


Don't Form Voltron Under the Bed

by Slightecho



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Aged-Up Character(s), Alternate Universe - High School, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Movie Fusion, Baby Keith (Voltron), Dad Hunk, Don't Look Under the Bed - Freeform, Female Pronouns for Pidge | Katie Holt, Gen, I Can't Believe I Wrote This, I just love halloween okay, Imaginary Friends, Like actual dad, Pidge Matt and Keith are all adopted by Shiro and Hunk, Pidge | Katie Holt-centric, Space Dad Shiro (Voltron), Yeah this is basically the Don't Look Under the Bed AU no one asked for, You remember that one disney channel movie, halloween fic, minor shunk, seriously he's nine in this, they're the parents, very minor plance at the end
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-10-23
Updated: 2019-01-01
Packaged: 2019-01-22 06:50:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 38,003
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12475820
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Slightecho/pseuds/Slightecho
Summary: Pidge is a teenage genius in a small town in the middle of suburban America, and only two things make her special;1. The fact that she skipped two grades and is a high school senior at age 162. Her strange, anything-but-nuclear adopted family. Her two dads, her brothers and herself.When a string of crazy pranks sends the town into turmoil, Pidge is the one in the middle of it all and has to somehow find out the true culprit. Fortunately, she has help. Unfortunately, that help comes in the form of a goofball who no one besides her can even see, who she thoroughly believes is just another elaborate prank being pulled on her. After all, imaginary friends don't make logical sense.AKA: The Don't Look Under the Bed AU no one asked for but I wrote because I watched the movie at 2 am the other night.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> So yeah, you read the summary right. This is actually a Don't Look Under the Bed themed AU with Voltron. Anyone still remember that Disney Channel Original Movie? No? Just me? That's okay! I don't think you really have to have seen it to understand this AU since I'm basically just remaking the movie with Voltron characters and themes. 
> 
> If you HAVE seen it and remember it, don't spoil it for others! 
> 
> The plot is going to remain the same as the movie, but I am changing a lot of the minor things along the way. And Modernizing it. You'll see as we go! Hope you enjoy!
> 
> PS: lol keef happy birthday you're literally nine in this fic okay bye

Pidge tossed in her sleep as the third strangely vivid dream that week took hold of her. She could see the stars floating past her, a surprisingly warm green light surrounding her. It was like she was looking out of some sort of windshield, translucent panels and readings presenting themselves out to her, directing her where to go. Despite the strange language they were written in, Pidge somehow seemed to understand them. They were close to their destination. As if on cue, her vessel jerked to the right, abruptly turning to face a familiar blue and green planet. “We’re home,” Pidge felt herself breathe, barely recognizing her own voice.

Her words seemed to melt the dream away and suddenly she was standing on the Earth’s surface, the grass curling around her feet in a way she’d nearly forgotten. Although she could no longer see the ship she’d come in, she could feel it nearby somehow and didn’t question how she’d gotten there any further. She was in front of a house she instantly recognized as her own. Her parents were inside; maybe even her brother—brothers? Did she have only one brother? That didn’t feel right. No, no, she had two brothers now. Her dads would be disappointed if they’d known she’d somehow forgotten about their youngest sibling.

She could practically hear her dad’s voice now, telling her that they were a family altogether. In fact, her dad’s voice sounded close. She turned her head about, looking for the source of the familiar sound. Her eyes were bleary as the green world of her dreams melted away into her own, dark bedroom. The nighttime stars gave way to green glow-in-the-dark ones hanging on the ceiling above her head.

“Pidge, honey,” her dad was yawning from the doorway. “It’s time to wake up.”

Reaching to her table to grab her glasses and shove them on her face, she matched his yawn. “It’s still dark out,” she argued as she saw her clock, which blinked 7:01 AM at her in flashing red. That was odd, she thought, normally it wasn’t this dark this early in the morning.

Her dad gave an unenthusiastic shrug. “Sometimes mornings are dark, Pidge,” he stretched, still in his own pajamas. A light in the hallway gave the white fringe of his hair its own sort of glow, and shined off his prosthetic arm. “Come on, your papa’s making breakfast before you kids head off to school.”

Pidge gave a nod, sitting up and pushing herself out of bed. Moments later she could smell the wafting scent of bacon from the floor below and hear Papa yelling at her older brother to take out the trash. It didn’t take long for her to get dressed and trudge her way downstairs, listening to her family’s voices as they debated the overwhelming feeling that something was off that morning. “Maybe the clocks are just wrong, Shiro? The power might have surged and made them reset or something,” her Papa said as he scooped food out from the frying pan in his hand onto the place settings at the table.

“No, they wouldn’t have all reset to the same time,” Dad had his arms crossed, eyeing the microwave timer specifically. “This one always resets to zero, and the one in our room has a battery so it shouldn't reset like that.”

“Maybe we time travelled,” Matt said with a wry grin as he came back from his trek out to the garbage bins.

“Yeah, right, like you could ever be a time traveler,” Pidge chuckled before stifling another yawn. She leaned over and gave her Papa a good morning kiss on the cheek. “Where’s Keith?” she asked.

“He should be coming down any second,” her Papa’s brown eyes were warm as he smiled at her and pointed to her seat with a spatula, indicating she was to sit and eat. “You don’t want to be late for school, my Lil Grade-Skippin Genius.” She smiled and obliged as Dad mumbled something about going to check the other clocks in the house.

Pidge and Matt had been young kids when the foster system had haphazardly relocated them to this tiny town, placing them with the two men who would eventually become their adopted fathers. Shiro and Hunk had met in college not long after Shiro had received his honorable discharge from the military, having received enough to earn him an education but leaving him one arm less than he’d had before his service. Hunk had been a young engineering student at the time, and became determined to invent some sort of prosthetic he deemed worthy of a hero like Shiro. Several years later they found themselves ready to start a family, became foster parents, and that’s when Matt and Pidge came to them and the connection between the four was instant. However, they still felt their family was incomplete after adopting the two siblings and years later fostered another young boy. A troubled, sick kid named Keith who had a penchant for getting hurt while rough-housing at the playground and lashing out at the doctors who tried to treat him.

But their dads never gave up on Keith and now he was getting better. He'd even started public school for the first time since he'd been placed with their family. They were hoping that by the time the year was out, the adoption would be finalized and his place as a permanent member of the family would be on paper. As if Keith’s place sitting right on Pidge’s lap wasn’t any indication of the fact that they considered themselves to be bonded as siblings.

By now, Matt and Pidge had taken to bickering over how the chores were divided up around mouthfuls of hash browns when Dad walked in, staring down at his phone’s screen with a stunned face. “It’s 4:30 in the morning,” he stated with his mouth hanging open dumbly.

“What?” Papa asked from the fridge, where he was lamenting over their apparent lack of eggs. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, it’s 4:30 in the morning. All of our clocks jumped three hours ahead,” Dad pointing a mechanical finger up at the microwave’s digital clock, which read 7:30. He turned the screen of the phone to Papa, who matched his facial expression, looking back and forth between the two clocks. They all stared, equally as stunned as Shiro was.

“That’s so weird,” Papa furrowed his brow and turned back to the fridge. “You know, all of our eggs are missing too. I just bought like two dozen of them and they’re just… gone.”

Pidge raised one eyebrow when she saw the grin spread across Matt’s face. He opened his mouth to suggest something, but she managed to interrupt before he could manage to say it. “I didn’t do it!” she said in a matter-of-fact tone of voice.

“No one’s saying you did, sweetheart,” Shiro gave her shoulder a squeeze and a kiss to the top of her head.

“Yeah,” Keith piped up in a quiet voice from where he was pushing his food around his plate with his fork. “It’s me that always gets blamed for everything.”

“That’s cause you have the most pent up anger,” Matt replied.

“I do not!” Keith yelled, flinging a forkful of ketchup-laden hashbrowns at the oldest sibling.

“All right, enough,” Shiro effortlessly lifted Keith off of Pidge’s lap and set him in his own seat. “No one’s saying anyone did anything. Just finish your breakfast and I guess we’ll try to get some more sleep before you kids have to head to school.”

The three hurriedly finished and deposited their plates into the sink before running to their individual bedrooms. Sleep didn’t come easy to Pidge—her mind constantly wandering back to her dream from the night before. How had she forgotten about Keith, even if it was in a dream? Guilt panged in her chest as she slowly watched the sunrise through the lace curtaining her window.

Before long she was walking down the sidewalk, headed towards school, with the closest thing she had to a best friend by her side. Skipping two grades didn’t really leave someone with a whole lot of friends, whether that was because kids were jealous or just uninterested in hanging out with a girl two years younger than them, Pidge wasn't entirely sure. It especially didn’t help that the skip had put her in the same year as her older brother, who was already regarded pretty much by the whole school as a nerd. Not that Matt minded that in the least. But the slim blonde girl beside her had been nice to her when Pidge had ventured into the Robotics Club one Wednesday during free period.

“Anyways, Rolo is thinking maybe we can take Beezer all the way to states if we can fix the faulty wiring leading to his wheels,” Nyma pulled the straps of her backpack with a shrug. “Speaking of my brother, how’s your brother doing?”

“Keith?” Pidge postulated. “He’s doing well, the doctors are really hopeful.”

“No, no, silly,” Nyma giggled. “Don’t get me wrong, that’s amazing to hear, but I meant Matt. Has he picked a college yet or…?”

The question struck Pidge as kind of odd, especially since Nyma and herself both were seniors and looking at colleges as well. Most high schoolers were too caught up in their own college searches to really care about the siblings of friends. Pidge certainly didn’t care where Nyma’s twin brother, Rolo, ended up going to college. “Why do you care where Matt goes?” she asked bluntly.

Nyma pulled her phone out to change the subject as quickly as she could. “Hey, did your alarm clock go off three hours early this morning?” she asked, presenting her phone to scroll through a few Facebook statuses of people all complaining of early wakeup calls.

Confusion washed over Pidge as she took in the sea of her peers all saying the same thing.

 **Shay Balmera:** tfw your alarm clock glitches out and wakes you up three hours early on a Monday D:

 **Rolo (Robo) Washington:** whichever of my siblings decided to set my alarms forward is ded

 **Ezor Everett:** uhhh so anyone else’s family get woken up crazy early this morning?

“Y-yeah,” Pidge breath, adjusting how her glasses sat on the bridge of her nose. “Yeah, the same thing happened at our house. Even the old military watch my Dad has was wrong and he checks the accuracy of that thing at least every other day.”

“Isn’t it the weirdest thing?” Nyma said, her voice sounding almost overjoyed at the mystery. “Apparently everyone’s clocks in town all did the same thing! Except the phones, that is. But even then the alarm apps got messed up and started ringing without reason.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Pidge argued. “There’s nothing that could cause that kind of phenomena.”

“My parents thought Rolo did it before they checked online. Now no one’s really sure.”

Pidge spent the rest of their walk deep in thought, trying to come up with some sort of answer as to why an entire town would experience such a thing. It was weird, she had to admit that much. But what was even weirder was that there was no logical explanation for what could cause a three-hour mess-up in all the clocks in town, both digital and analog. She mulled over the idea of the possibility it could have been a mass-prank by all the seniors of her high school that she hadn’t heard about. Matt could have easily have been the reason it happened in her own house. It sounded like a silly enough prank for his tastes.

She ignored Nyma’s ramblings as she mulled it over in her head until suddenly Nyma grabbed her arm and gave it a squeeze. “Dude, do you have tuna in your lunch bag or something?” she raised one eyebrow, looking repeatedly over her shoulder.

“What, no, why?” Pidge turned quickly to see what her friend was looking at and was met by a very round pair of green eyes staring back up at her from the sidewalk. A handful of cats stood behind her, clearly having been following them down the road, if the large yellow-ish one running to catch up from some distance away was any indication.

“Uhh, dude, the patchy one’s been following us since your house,” Nyma laughed at Pidge’s facial expression, which Pidge assumed must’ve been very amusing. The calico cat was covered in orange, black and white patches and their green cat eyes felt like they were staring daggers into her soul. She swallowed a lump down and took in the sight of the other four behind it. A greyish blue one reached out to bap an orange tabby on the head as they sat together, tails curling around one another. A black one wasn’t too far behind them, watching as the light yellow-ish one just managed to catch up to the group. Five cats altogether.

“I don’t…?” Pidge shook her head. “I didn’t pack my lunch.”

Nyma laughed incredulously. “Congrats on your new cats, then, I guess?”

Pidge gave her an unamused glare. “They’ll lose interest once we get to school,” she stated and turned to keep going. The cats persistently followed as the two started debating theories on what could have caused the Great Clock Fiasco all the way until they reached the school. At one point Nyma suggested some sort of magnetic disturbance, which almost made Pidge keel over with laughter. Eventually they agreed that it had to have been some kind of senior prank they hadn’t heard about and decided to start gathering data on whose houses had been affected and meet back together at lunch to review.

Pidge was halfway done at her first locker stop of the day and thinking back to the strange way that green-eyed cat had stared her down when she related the feeling the stray cat had given her to the way her dream from the night before did. It was a warm, familiar feeling. As if she’d known it her whole life and just hadn’t remembered it until then. “Green,” she breathed in thought before a shiver helped her to shake it off. That was a silly fantasy. There was no way that her dream had any connection to the cat.

When she shut her locker she could feel eyes on her again, but it was different than the cat. This made her hair stand on end and was as unwelcome as anything she’d ever experienced. She quickly turned about, looking to see if anyone was watching her when her searching gaze fell on a pair of blue eyes some feet away.

The boy had on a raggedy old red hoodie that looked vaguely familiar to Pidge, but that was the only normal thing he wore. A pair of wire-rimmed sunglasses sat on top of his head, despite the cloudy weather outside, the lenses shining a blue color in the fluorescent lights that rivaled his eyes. Underneath the hoodie he seemed to be wearing an actual pair of white and black striped overalls over a plain blue t-shirt. The outfit looked like something a badly put together Sim would wear and Pidge wrinkled her nose. She didn’t understand fashion, but she knew that wasn’t it.

A grin split the boy’s face and he winked at her, doing what appeared to be finger guns. The bizarre feeling he gave her made her jump and she realized she’d been staring back at him. She felt uncomfortable and quickly turned to the person whose locker neighbored her. “Excuse me,” she breathed. “Who is that guy over there? He’s staring at me.”

The short haired girl looked over Pidge’s head, following where she pointed. Pidge recognized her from her Chemistry class from third period and had to remind herself of the girl’s name. Shay, she finally concluded it was. “What guy?” Shay asked in her normal sweet voice.

Pidge blinked. “The one right over—“ she turned to point at him, but he was gone. “Well… he WAS right there.”

“He must’ve gone to class,” Shay shrugged. “I wouldn’t worry about it. He probably just thinks you’re cute or something.”

Pidge wrinkled her nose and watched as Shay shouldered her own bag, her locker swinging shut with a metallic clang. That was the third weird thing to happen to her today and she hadn’t even gotten to class yet. Speaking of weird things… “Hey, Shay, you posted on Facebook something about your alarm clocks going off this morning right?”

The two girls ducked their heads down to discuss the similar experience they’d shared that morning as they retreated to their class. Further down the hall, as students began to filter out, the oddly dressed boy wandered, sniffing at the air. He shoved his tanned hands deep into the pockets of his overalls, trying not to cough at the pungent odor that hung in the air. What even was he dressed as today? Maybe some sort of railroad conductor? That would explain the striped overalls. But not the hoodie. Some days he just didn't even bother to guess anymore, and today was one of those days.

The hallway was quiet now, save for the faint static noise in the back of his mind. Slav hadn’t given him instructions yet, but he was eager and fidgety, wanting to act. That girl almost looked like she’d seen him, which was strange. Hey, why was he in a high school of all places, anyways? What could possibly be here that was relevant to his mission?

As if an answer to his question, there was a scuffling noise coming from somewhere above his head. The roof, he thought to himself, and broke out into a run. He had to get there quickly, before some other trick could be pulled on this small town. Before the pranks got dangerous.


	2. Chapter 2

Dr. Kolivan was a great teacher, really. And Physics truly was Pidge’s favorite subject. But the entire class period, she couldn’t help but think about what Shay had told her about their own clocks going off that morning. Shay set her own alarms using only her phone, which couldn’t have had it’s clock reset as easily as, say, Pidge’s microwave clock or a watch on her Dad’s wrist could have been. Yet regardless of that fact, all of the times in Shay’s alarm app had been somehow switched around so that she also woke up three hours earlier than needed. That was an even more amazing feat to the young girl. Everyone she’d asked so far had somehow had the same weird prank pulled on them. The same experience. However, she only really knew the senior class, so the pool of people she’d asked had been severely limited.

That was how she found herself raising her hand for Dr. Kolivan before she could even stop herself. He seemed startled by the unexpected interruption, but not annoyed. Pidge was brilliant, but she preferred to remain quiet in class if she had anything to say about it. When he called on her she couldn’t help herself as the question tumbled out. “I’m so sorry, Dr. Kolivan, this question actually has nothing to do with Physics but it’s actually a more personal question, as weird as that sounds,” she babbled, “Did your alarm clocks go off three hours early this morning?”

Dr. Kolivan hesitated, putting the digital board’s pen down on the tray below. “How did you know that?” he asked. It was answer enough for Pidge, which frustrated her to no end. She had hoped Dr. Kolivan would be the independent variable, having no kids of his own, nor any of the school’s seniors having access to his home, clocks, or phone. The fact that he’d experienced the same phenomena skewed the trend she was hoping to see in her data and made her have to rethink her theory about it being a senior prank.

“Well, it happened to a lot of people,” she answered with a huff of breath, lifting the notebook she’d been recording the names and contact info of everyone she’d been talking to. “Nyma and I—you know Nyma, she’s in the Robotic’s Club with me—we’ve been trying to collect a sampling of people it happened to. To see if we can find any common variables in the victims and isolate one as the cause. It’s a really weird thing to happen and I have my own theories, but—“

“Nerd,” breathed a boy some few chairs from hers and she felt her own voice falter and stop.

“That’s enough,” Dr. Kolivan quieted the boy. But it was too late. Pidge already felt a thin sheen of sweat form on the back of her neck from embarrassment as a few other students let slip their own chuckles. It was enough knowing that people didn’t talk to her because she was the girl who skipped two grades, she didn’t need to be told it outright by her classmates, most of whom were around two years older than she was. The teacher continued, unfazed. “Can I see this,” Dr. Kolivan pointed down at her notebook.

She gave him a sheepish grin and nodded, holding the wire-bound paper out for him. He flipped through the two or three pages she’d completed, but it wasn’t much more than a social media contact list right now. The actual data of what they’d told her was all stored in her own head. She’d get it in writing from them later over direct messages and write a summary later.

As he reviewed her pieces of paper, the unsettling feeling of being watched settled over her again, the same way it had near her locker just before class. It wasn’t her classmates staring at her—that was a feeling she knew too well. This felt almost cold, the way some crackpots on television described the feeling of paranormal activity, or "ghosts." Like cold electricity was crawling down her spine.

She looked around the classroom, trying to see if maybe someone else had felt what she figured had to just be a cold burst of air conditioning. Then she saw him again—the same tall boy as before. Only this time he was standing in the corner of the classroom, playing with one of Dr. Kolivan’s many dioramas. She made a scoffing noise at the gumption he must have had to just be loitering there, messing with the teacher’s things like that. It seemed to draw his attention as he turned to look at her, his blue eyes wide with surprise.

“Well this is certainly very interesting, but I’m afraid a few names and social media handles hardly proves anyth—“ Dr. Kolivan stopped abruptly when he realized that Pidge was staring at the empty corner of the room with hyper focus. “Pidge?” he gently placed the notebook back on her desk. “Pidge, are you with us?” After a few moments of her staring off into space, someone kicked at her chair and that finally snapped her from her reverie.

By the time the last period had rolled around, Dr. Kolivan, as well as the entire student body, had left the school to find his purple beauty of a sports car drenched in sticky, mashed egg yolks. Pidge’s classmates were quick to start pointing fingers after the strange interruption their day had taken, which she promptly chose to ignore. Dr. Kolivan was one of her own favorite teachers, but there were a great many other students who disliked him. And besides, she'd had no real reason to do such a thing. Sure, he'd seem less than impressed with her contact list, but if Pidge was being honest that wasn't really anything stellar. It was just a list of names. Nothing special yet.

“So wait you kept seeing some kid in weird places around your school?” Nyma asked that afternoon, shooting another look at the posse of five cats following close behind Pidge. “And no one else knew who he was?”

“People kept acting like they couldn’t see him,” Pidge grumbled, nearly tripping over the calico for the thirteenth time that walk home. After leaving her school, she had quickly discovered the cats had seemingly been waiting for her out in the courtyard all day. And now they were trailing behind her again, the green-eyed one refusing to leave her side.

“I mean, was he cute at least?”

“Priorities, Nyma,” Pidge sighed, pushing her glasses up the bridge of her nose. “What kind of weird joke is it to get the whole school to pretend they can’t see some kid? I bet he was the one who egged Dr. Kolivan’s car. He did act weird in Dr. Kolivan's class; like I'd caught him doing something he shouldn't be.”

“People are trying to pin that egg thing on you,” Nyma shrugged, indicating she didn’t believe a word of it. “Saying that you tried to show some experiment to Dr. Kolivan and he told you that you were doing it wrong.”

Pidge couldn’t help but snorting. “Yeah, okay. That’s a game of telephone gone wrong, there. I showed Dr. Kolivan my list of contacts about the clock thing and he said social media handles didn't prove anything. To be fair, he wasn’t wrong.” The green-eyed cat meowed up at her, looking at the other cats trailing behind. The grey and the orange one were play fighting again and the black one had stopped briefly to groom the white fluff of fur on it's chest.

By the time they’d arrived to Pidge’s house, Matt was already home, having been dropped off by one of his friends who had a car. “Hey Matt,” Nyma called as he fiddled with his house keys. He sheepishly grinned and waved back at her before letting himself inside.

Pidge raised an eyebrow, connecting the dots from her conversation with the girl that morning and her dopey smile now. “Do you have a crush on my brother or something?” she made a face.

Nyma’s eyes grew wide. “You’d better not tell him!” She grabbed at Pidge’s shoulder and started shaking her frantically.

“Oh my god, stop! Why would I tell him? My only friend and my brother dating? That’s gross.” She pushed Nyma’s arms off and felt a grimace at the idea. “Besides, what does it matter if he finds out? He might like you back. Who knows; you’re certainly pretty enough.”

“Listen,” Nyma sighed. “I’m your best friend, whether you want to admit it or not. So as your best friend, promise you won’t tell him? It’s embarrassing.”

Pidge sighed, but nodded along anyways. “Embarrassing? Nyma, I’m two years younger than you and I’m telling you, you need to grow up.”

“Oh shut up, BESTIE,” Nyma teased, giving Pidge a playful shove up towards her house. They gave each other laughing goodbyes before Nyma headed further down the street towards her own home, which was just a block or two away.

Pidge managed to shake the green-eyed cat off as she headed towards her front door. It would be a few minutes until the bus dropped Keith off from school, his too-large backpack in tow and hopefully not sporting any new bruises from fights he'd picked with other kids, which was a regular occurrence that their dads were trying to put a stop to. Though, frankly, given everything that had happened that day, she wouldn’t doubt for a second that the early wake-up call had made her younger brother cranky enough to start a fight. She gave a sigh, shaking her head as a cool breeze rustled through the leaves and through her hair.

A prickling started on the back of her neck, the feeling too familiar by this point. She sighed and looked over her shoulder to see the thin, tan-skinned boy standing across the street, yawning. He’d had a wardrobe change since Pidge’s Physics class. Instead of the weird hoodie and overalls get-up from before, he now wore something a bit more normal. A grey and blue baseball shirt, an olive green cargo jacket haphazardly thrown on over it, all over a simple pair of blue jeans and sneakers. She stared him down, hesitating before finally decided to just confront the boy himself. “Are you following me?” her voice sounded stern, even to her.

The boy jerked his head around in surprise, blinking at her. He looked around, as if she had to be talking to someone else. Anyone else besides him. However, the street was empty now save for the five cats who were making themselves right at home in the bushes in front of Pidge’s house. “Yeah, you!” Pidge was getting annoyed now.

He slid the blue lenses down off of his nose, looking at her appraisingly. “You can see me?” he finally spoke, sounding almost incredulous.

A disbelieving laugh rippled through Pidge’s chest. This had to be yet another prank of some sort, but now she had him caught. “Of course I can see you!” she crossed her arms and held her chin up, proud. “You’re standing right there!” boy’s mouth hung open; he seemed frozen to the spot. Probably too stunned at being called out on his nonsense, Pidge thought to herself.

A rumbling of an engine caught Pidge’s attention as a yellow school bus turned the corner. It was Keith’s bus, and Pidge sighed, holding a finger out to the boy across the street. “Stay right there,” she instructed. “I’m not done with you!”

The school bus came to a squeaking stop in front of the boy, cutting him off from Pidge’s view as it carefully dropped her younger brother off at her feet. He didn’t seem to have any bruises, so he hadn’t gotten into any fights at school, which gave Pidge a sigh of relief. But he did look just as grumpy as she’d predicted he’d be. “Were you waiting for me?” were the first words out of Keith's mouth as he looked her up and down, eyeing her suspiciously.

“What, can’t I wait for my younger brother to get home from school?” she gave him a sly grin, but he just scowled in return.

“I’m not a baby, Pidge,” he grumbled and pushed past her on his way into the house.

She sighed as she watched him retreat. The loud sound of the bus starting to leave had her turning back to look for the strange boy, ready to have it out with him for being the most likely cause of the troubles that had plagued her whole day. He had to have been behind the eggs, she thought to herself. It was the only way to explain how startled he'd been in Dr. Kolivan's classroom earlier. But as the bus pulled away and rounded the corner, he was nowhere to be seen.

Gone, as if into thin air.

Through the power of the internet, news quickly reached Pidge by the end of the night that more oddities (or, as Pidge believed they had to be, pranks) had gone down at the school, and they weren’t all harmless. The swim team had gotten to their assigned lockers that evening for practice to find their swim caps and state-issued suits filled to the brim with green goo, which after examination, turned out to just be lime J-Ello. Principal Haggar had opened the door to her office at the end of the days to find a hive of bees swarming and had to call a beekeeper—but not before sustaining several stings herself. And according to Keith, his bus to school that morning had flooded with water during the school day, despite the fact that it hadn’t rained all day.

Then the next morning, they all woke at their normal time of 7 AM to find the town had been coated in graffiti. Every flat surface seemed to have been painted overnight with the letter “V,” as if by some sort of magic. Storefronts, park benches, everything down to every single individual locker door at the high school. All of them were painted with the single letter “V.” No paint cans were found anywhere, no sign of who could have done such a massive act of widespread vandalism overnight was left behind. It was truly the most baffling mystery that week.

That morning, her parents had a very awkward conversation with their three kids, trying to find out if the oldest two knew anything about the strange jokes being pulled around town, which of course, neither of them did. Keith didn’t find any of this nearly as amusing as Matt did, and when Papa had turned the discussion to recount tales of pranks he’d pulled when he was their age, Keith loudly complained that his tricks were “boring” and “vanilla.” Their dads were quick to dismiss the boy and urge him not to describe anything as “vanilla” again, not sure where he’d learned the term from.

“Where’s all the J-Ello?” Papa eventually asked, peering with confusing into the cupboard.

“What’s that, babe?” Dad asked, looking up over his book.

“I was gonna make your favorite, Green Goo A La Hunk, for dessert tonight,” their Papa explained, starting to untie his apron from around his waist. “But the lime J-Ello is gone.”

“Wow it’s just a lime J-Ello kind of day,” Matt snickered to himself around his spoonful of cereal.

“I guess I have to go to the store,” Papa murmured to himself, turning to face his kids with a very confused expression across his face.

“I didn’t take it,” Keith groaned. “J-Ello is gross. It feels all… squishy and weird…” He gave a visible shudder as he explained the sensation, his face contorting up. Clearly the idea that a box of J-Ello in the cupboard and the finished product were different things was momentarily lost on the young boy.

“No one’s saying you took anything, Keith,” Shiro reassured with a gentle pat to the boy’s hand.

“Well someone had to take it,” Pidge spoke up. “If it was there yesterday and gone today then the only logical explanation…” She trailed off into silence as she noticed her Dad giving her a look to stop, reaching up to wiggle his mechanical hand in a straight line back and forth across his neck. The message was clear; you’re gonna upset Keith. He'll think you're blaming him. Cut it out.

As Pidge walked down the hallway of her school later that day, she could feel every pair of eyes turn to look at her. A knot of nerves formed in her stomach, remembering how quick everyone had been to blame the egging of Dr. Kolivan’s car on her and suspecting that was the reason for their appraising stares. “Why is everyone watching me?” she breathed to Shay as she finally approached her locker.

Even Shay, whose face was normally kind and happy to see everyone, looked suspicious of her as she poked a finger to Pidge’s locker door. “Yours is the only one without a V on it,” she stated in a way that made it clear that that was her answer.

Pidge’s locker door was as clean as ever, no sign of the vandalism that had run its course through the town. It was weird, she’d give them that much. And she truly had no way to explain it. But she had to act cool; if she freaked out it would only make them think they’d caught her red handed. “So what?” she asked. “They just must have skipped my locker.” She grabbed the dial of the locker, spinning her combination into place before jerking the door open.

On the inside of the door, in between the pinned-up drawings Keith had gifted her and the pictures of different star clusters she admired, was a thick white letter “V.” And it was inside of her locker.

Her mouth dropped open and she could feel the emotion start to pour over her, her eyes filling with tears. “I didn’t do this,” she breathed to Shay. Who would have been able to get her locker combination? Were they purposefully trying to make her look bad? She grabbed her Physics textbook as quickly as she could, slamming her locker shut before anyone else in the growing crowd of students could get a peek at the incriminating paint, taking off towards class. Her thoughts were swimming as the realization had dawned on her that someone was purposefully blaming her for things she didn't do.

The whispers and pointed stares followed her all day, making time drag by until Pidge’s daily lunch period with Nyma. She stretched her back as she walked towards the entrance to the cafeteria’s serving area, students already lined up to get their trays full of whatever gross mystery casserole the lunch ladies decided to deem as “edible food” today. In front of the menu board before the entrance, Pidge could see Nyma standing with her arms crossed, her foot tapping impatiently. “You’re not gonna believe what happened with my locker earlier,” she groaned out as she approached her friend.

The glare Nyma sent Pidge sent chills up her spine and stopped her in her tracks. “You promised,” she grumbled, turning to walk away from her.

“Promised what?” she asked, confusion washing over her. She reached out to put a hand on Nyma’s arm, gently trying to stop her from walking away.

The blonde girl swirled on her toes to look Pidge in the eye, her hand stabbing an accusing finger at the menu board. “’Nyma loves Matt?!’” she read out loud. The white board, which usually listed out the day's choices for entrees in interchangeable block letters like an old movie marquee, had only three words on it today. Dead center, for all the world to see.

NYMA

<3

MATT

A hand floated towards Pidge’s mouth as she gasped. She could see people starting to turn their heads at the volume which Nyma had yelled it. “How could you, Pidge?”

“This wasn’t me!” she shook her head, disbelievingly. She tried to reach out a hand to her arm again, but the girl pushed her away just as quick as she tried.

“You’re the only one I told!”

“Nyma, I swear—“

“Save it, Pidge!” the blonde girl stormed away from the cafeteria, clearly choosing not to stay for her lunch period. As her back retreated from the scene, the audience attention started to drift back to Pidge.

Anxiety ripped through her chest in a way she hadn’t felt it do in years as the other students started to size her up. Nyma was well-loved by most of the school, so naturally anyone who would want to hurt her would face the wrath of everyone else. But the only problem was, Pidge was innocent. She would never have done something like this to her best friend. In fact, she hadn’t even thought about Nyma’s crush on her brother since the night before when she'd first found out. It had been the farthest thing from her mind. “Sh-show’s over,” Pidge announced, realizing that she didn’t sound nearly as confident as she’d wanted to. “Go back to your lunch.”


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Pidge finally confronts the mysterious boy who's been following her around, suspecting he's the one behind all of the troubles she's been facing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So when I started writing this fic I had intended to have it timed out so that the last chapter would go up ON Halloween. But due to life and the fact that I never estimate how many chapters I'll need correctly, this may go beyond Halloween. I don't know! We'll see! But either way, enjoy!

“Hey Pidge,” Rolo called out over the tops of the two divided lunch lines. “Are you the one who made that sign about my sister?!” the boy’s voice carried across the open space, not lost on anyone within range. It made Pidge cringe. The last thing she wanted right now was for anyone’s attention to be drawn to the obvious.

She sighed as Rolo walked around, managing to squeeze his way into the line next to Pidge. “No,” she answered. “I’d never do that to Nyma.” People were starting to watch again.

“Hey, I believe you, okay?” Rolo nudged her shoulder with his hand. “But you should know what they’re all saying. The sign? The lockers? The eggs? Everyone thinks that was all you, too. So tell me, Pidge…”

Pidge looked Rolo in the eye, searching for the rest of his question, but it never came. “Tell you what?” she finally prompted.

“Did you tag the lockers? Come on, you can tell me if you did! I think it’s pretty cool—fight the man and all that stuff!”

Pidge rolled her eyes at Rolo’s enthusiasm. “Spray painting lockers isn’t ‘cool,’ Rolo. It’s vandalism. There’s way cooler things. Like Beezer,” she decided her best choice of action was to change the subject. “How is he? Did you think up a plan for how to get his wiring fixed?”

“What does the ‘V’ stand for?” Rolo asked, ignoring her attempt at a diversion.

“How should I know?!” she snapped, slamming her tray down on the metal bars. The metallic clang rang through the space and caused a surprised hush to pass through the room. “I didn’t put a ‘V’ on all the lockers!” She spoke in a harsh whisper, fed up with no one believing her. Rolo sighed and nodded, finally accepting her answer. “Now please,” she turned back to her fruit and veggie options for the day. “Just tell me about Beezer.”

As Rolo started to prattle on about the faulty circuits in the Robotic Team’s top contender for the states title, Pidge glanced up over the cash register just in time to see the thin boy who had been haunting her free thoughts staring her down from across the room with what appeared to be some kind of kaleidoscope. When she finally locked eyes with him, he pulled the device away from his face, leaving an inky black ring around his eye like some sort of child’s prank gone wrong. His face split in that now familiar cheshire smile and he waved excitedly at her.

“I’ll talk to you later, Rolo,” she interrupted him as she quickly paid for her food, eyes still watching the boy carefully to make sure he didn’t up and disappear on her again. He was sitting on top of an empty table and his outfit today wasn’t quite as bizarre as the day before, but there’s still something just odd about seeing a boy in a full tuxedo in the middle of a high school cafeteria. She quickly approached the boy, setting her tray on the empty table, determined that she wasn’t going to let him get away this time. “You’re not running away again”

He feigned offense, lifting one hand to mockingly clutch at pearls that didn’t exist. “Excuse me?” his voice was cool. “I didn’t ‘run away!’” It was the closest she’d been to the boy yet and this close she could easily tell that he looked to be roughly Matt’s age.

“Yes you did!” she growled, recalling the day before when he’d taken the distraction of Keith’s school bus as a chance to disappear without a trace.

“No, I did not! I just needed to take a moment to re-evaluate the situation, okay?” his voice was growing louder, the boy clearly having no grasp of indoor versus outdoor voices. It didn’t faze Pidge as much as she thought it would, still remembering clearly when Keith had been placed with their family and he’d practically shouted everything when he felt the smallest emotion towards something. “I didn’t know you could see me and then suddenly you’re all like ‘who are you?!’ And I had to think about what to do okay?”

Pidge scoffed at his answer. Everything he said made the situation she was in seem all the more ridiculous. “Why wouldn’t I be able to see you?” she crossed her arms over her chest stubbornly.

The boy actually stood up on the table, causing Pidge great alarm as he waved his hands out in big, spinning circles. It was as if he was spinning himself around in order to point at the entire room of people. “Cause nobody else can!” he answered.

She gave him a look that she hope conveyed her disbelief accordingly. “Yeah, right.”

His face fell and he heaved a sigh, rubbing his blue eyes with his thumb and forefinger. “Okay, fine,” he breathed, hopping of the table in one swift motion. “Watch this.”

Pidge wished she wasn’t so prone to second hand embarrassment in that moment as the boy actually walked over to the table of football players and climbed effortlessly up onto their table. Once he was up there, he started dancing to some made up song in his head, his hips moving like a salsa dancer. None of the jocks looked up or even seemed to notice as he shimmied down, plucking a French fry off of one of their trays and stuffing it into his mouth.

When no one took notice of the intrusive action in their daily lives, he gave Pidge a pointed shrug and stole another fry, quickly joining her side again. She blinked a couple of times and shook her head. “That proves nothing, and THAT,” she pointed to the half-eaten food in his hand, “is stealing.”

“Hey! He shouldn’t be eating this junk, okay?” the boy defended himself as he shoved the last bit of fry in his mouth. “It’s bad for his skin and he CLEARLY does not exfoliate.”

Her jaw dropped and for once in her life, Pidge felt speechless. When she didn’t say anything, he made a clear grin of pleasure, his blue eyes gleaming mischievously. “Who even are you?” she blanked, spitting out the first thing she could think of.

“Uh,” his breath hitched with a laugh. “The name’s Lance.”

“Lance?” she repeated.

“Full name, Lancey-Lance,” he beamed.

“Okay, now I know you’re yanking my chain,” she rolled her eyes and pointedly sat down to eat her lunch. The boy, Lance, quickly moved to sit down beside her and tried to steal one of her carrots, but she was too quick for him, sliding it out from his grasp. “That’s clearly made up. And why don’t you have a last name?”

“Like you’re one to talk about made up names, _Pidge_ ,” he rolled his eyes. “And what’s your last name?”

“Lancey isn’t even a real name. You just stuck a ‘y’ to the end of it.”

He gave a bored groan, tossing his head back as he crawled up onto the table again, making another grab for her carrots, which she dodged. His tongue stuck out at her as he put his hands flat on the table, stretching his stomach up into the air. After a second he was in a full back bend position… in a tuxedo. Pidge raised one eyebrow at him; there was no way that was comfortable. “Wow, I’m glad adults usually can’t see me,” he replied. “It’s so boriiing. And it’s a good thing my name doesn’t sound real. Cause I’m not a real person.” She gave him another incredulous look. Was this kid for real? A second later he was back on his feet, bowing as if the table were his own personal stage. “I am an imaginary friend!” He shot back up, his voice taking on a loud, authoritative tone, as if he were narrating for himself. “And the crowd went wild! Woooo! Lance! Lance! Lance!” He starting banging his hands together, applauding himself. Still, no one else in the cafeteria batted an eye.

A laugh ripped through Pidge before she could stop it. “What?” she asked, amazed at the very suggestion of the idea. “Listen, I don’t have an imaginary friend. I’m way too old for that kind of thing. Whatever prank you’re pulling or whoever set you up to this—“

Lance guffawed. “Did I say I was your imaginary friend? No way!” From the face he made, Pidge could tell that the idea clearly disgusted him for some reason. Part of her was glad; after how uncomfortable he’d made her the last couple of days, this was his karma.

“Then why are you following me?”

Lance laughed. “I’m not following you,” he stated. Then he wiggled his fingers in front of her face. “You’re just… imagining it…” She glared up at him, frozen in place by the audacity of the pun. While she sat stunned, he quickly scooped up one of her carrots and bit into it with a satisfying crunch.

It was enough to snap her back to attention and she angrily grabbed her tray, having had enough of the obvious stories and lies. She turned towards the door, wishing she could just go home and have the day be over with. “Pidge! Pidge, wait!” she could hear Lance calling from behind her as he scrambled off the table to try and follow her. “Okay, real talk for a second. I think the head honcho sent me here to help you! That’s gotta be why you can see me!”

“I don’t need help,” Pidge practically growled over his shoulder at him. Somewhere inside of herself she knew that was a lie. Everyone at the school blamed her for everything awful happening and she hadn’t done any of it. What was worse, today it seemed like someone was actually purposefully targeting her for the blame. They'd even turned her own best friend against her.

“See, that’s where you’re wrong,” Lance procured a comically large magnifying glass from somewhere inside of his tuxedo jacket, bringing it up to his eye and taking on a fake English accent. “The game is afoot! There’s a mystery here that needs to be solved! A riddle to be uncovered! The final problem! A tangled web being woven with you right in the middle of it!”

God this kid was dramatic, Pidge found herself thinking with a sigh. But he wasn’t lying. She paused before pushing the contents of her lunch into the trash bin, her appetite gone if it had ever existed in the first place, and set the tray atop. The idea that anyone believed her, maybe even someone she was sure was all a part of the prank, was a relief. “I didn’t spray paint any lockers,” she stated, turning to look at Lance again. She blinked at the strange hat sitting on top of his head. “Where did you get a deerstalker?”

“Not important,” Lance shrugged, yanking the hat off of his chocolate locks and tossing it away with a whip of his hand. It landed in the lunch tray of a nearby cheerleader, but she didn’t even appear to notice. “What is important is that I know who did paint the lockers. And made the sign outside. And egged your teacher’s car.”

“Who?”

Lance looked around, as if afraid someone would hear him. He motioned for her to get close, leaning in for a whisper. She obliged, her ear only inched from his mouth. “It was,” his voice was barely a whisper. And then, suddenly, his voice was a very loud yell. “THE BOOGEYMAN!”

Pidge gave a yelp and jumped, clamping a hand over her now-ringing ear. “Jeez!” she squeezed her eyes shut. “The Boogeyman?! Really?!” She was just mad now. Mad at this boy for clearly having something to do with all of the weird things that had been happening, mad at him for playing games with the answers she wanted, and now mad because he straight up screamed in her ear. “That’s it!”

She yanked an empty chair back from a nearby table and decided, if Lance could stand on tables and get away with it, then so could she. She was sick and tired of this little game the whole school seemed to be playing on her. Clearly the senior prank had been just to mess with Pidge, the weird genius "nerd" girl who everyone hated. “Okay, listen up! Someone tell me who this guy is,” she demanded loudly, jabbing a finger back towards Lance behind her. The entire cafeteria had settled into stunned silence, everyone staring up at her as she made a spectacle of herself. “He says his full name is Lancey-Lance. Which, I mean, come on!” She made a show of laughing as if that furthered her point, but when she was met with only blank stares, she stopped the show. “Does anyone know who he is?! Whose homeroom is this guy in--?”

She turned to look at Lance and point at him again, thinking maybe she was pointing in the wrong direction and they weren't sure who she was referring to. But when she looked, he was gone. "No! Not again!" She whipped her head around the other way, thinking maybe he was just in her blind spot. As she wildly turned around, a few laughs could be heard starting from the farthest corners of the room. How could she have let Lance get away from her again? And worse, she’d just made a fool of herself in front of half the student body, who were now murmuring with pointed laughter at her.

And it certainly didn’t help to keep them from staring at her the rest of the day. In fact, now the stares and whispers were accompanied by the same laughter.

Two periods later, after the incident had a chance to spread around the school, Pidge found herself being called down to the guidance counselor’s office to have a chat with not only the counselor, but Principal Haggar, as well as Dr. Kolivan and her dad. The guidance counselor went only by his first name—Coran—and sported a rather impressive mustache that was the talk of legend around the school. Pidge took an uneasy seat next to her Dad as he gently reached out to give her shoulder a squeeze. Papa must’ve been at work and Dad was the only one who could get to the school on such short notice, Pidge thought to herself.

“Now let me see, here,” Principal Haggar shuffled through the hefty amount of paperwork in Pidge’s file. There tended to be a lot of paperwork involved when you were a former foster kid who'd ended up skipping two grades. “There’s been talk among the students that you might know something about the many different pranks being pulled around the school, and your display in the cafeteria today certainly didn’t do anything to help your case.”

“Kids talk, Haggar,” Coran surmised out loud. “That doesn’t prove that Pidge here had anything to do with any of it.” The guidance counselor, at least, seemed to be on her side.

“There’s been some stress at home,” Shiro stepped in, also rising to her defense. “With her younger brother’s illness and the stress of his adoption being finalized.”

Haggar looked between the two men and then back down at her file. “You go by the name Pidge,” she stated as if they didn’t already know. “You underwent the name change when you were adopted by you two fathers, is that correct?”

“Yes,” Pidge answered, not sure where the principal was leading with this.

“Now, according to my paperwork here, your original last name began with the letter ‘V,’ did it not?” she pointed to the top of one piece of worn out paper from the top of the file. “Voltron, was it? It’s an odd last name.”

A lump had taken form in Pidge’s throat. She didn’t like being reminded of the strange moniker she’d had before she and Matt had found their family. Once her dads had gotten the paperwork to adopt her, she had begged them to change it and they had been more than supportive of her choice.

“Dr. Kolivan had come forward stating that he found, in your possession, a list of the names and contact info of most of the seniors here at the school,” Haggar continued before she’d been given any sort of answer. “It is believed that the clock change that happened around town was part of a large, organized group of senior students pulling their last prank. Do you have anything to say to that?”

Pidge shrugged timidly. “I mean the idea of a senior prank was the theory I’d come to, too,” she murmured. “That’s why I was taking to list of names. To try and create a-a-a sort of data pool of the people affected.”

“And then shortly after Dr. Kolivan caught you with this list, his car was vandalized here on school property,” Haggar continued.

“Well yes, but I didn’t have anything to do with it!” Pidge bristled.

“My daughter isn’t a vandal, Principal Haggar,” Shiro spoke up again, sounding more than a little irritated with the witch of a woman.

“Pidge, I understand if you might be feeling a little attacked right now,” Coran’s voice was as kind as ever. “We’re on your side, here. We just want to help you.”

“The graffiti on the lockers all bear the letter ‘V.’” Haggar stated.

“Surely you’re not suggesting my daughter would graffiti a name she no longer identifies with on all around town,” her Dad’s metal fist was clenching and unclenching underneath the table as he struggled to remain composed.

“Certainly not, Shiro,” Coran lifted a hand up in defense. “Pidge has shown so much improvement since being adopted by you and Hunk. It’s clear to anyone that she’s never been happier than she was before then.”

“Oh my god,” Pidge groaned at the implcation, pressing a hand to her face. They thought she was experiencing some sort of psychological trauma. “I’m not acting out because I was adopted! I love my dads! And my brothers! I wouldn’t have it any other way!”

“You also mentioned that her younger brother has been ill, is that correct?” Haggar quickly changed the subject.

“Yes,” Shiro’s voice got quieter at the subject. “He had leukemia when he was placed with our family. But he’s in remission. The doctors are confident that he’s going to make a full recovery.”

“They usually treat leukemia with marrow transplants, yes?” Dr. Kolivan was the one to speak now. “Those are usually obtained from biological family members. I remember Pidge saying before that one of her brothers was biological. Perhaps-”

“Matt is the biological brother,” Shiro corrected. “If you couldn't tell from how much they look alike. He and Pidge were placed with us together. Her younger brother came to us separately.”

“So the marrow didn’t come from Pidge?” Dr. Kolivan nodded.

“Well, we tried to see if any of us were a match, because there’s always a chance, but,” Shiro trailed off with a sharp inhale of air. “No, the marrow came from an anonymous donor in the end.”

“Wow, you guys are really trying to twist this into a tortured foster kid narrative, aren’t you?” Pidge rolled her eyes and shook her head. Normally it wasn't like her to speak back at any of her teachers, but watching her Dad have to hash all this out with them was making her angry and defensive. “This isn’t some psychological thing I’m going through! I’m not acting out. I didn’t do it!”

“Then who do you think did, Pidge?” Coran breathed easily.

The question settled over her and she chewed on it. There was one strange thing about the past few days that they hadn’t questioned her on. And if something wasn’t the question, then there was a good chance that it was actually the answer. “There’s been this weird guy hanging around lately,” she explained. “He’s been following me around non-stop. But anytime I try to talk to him or ask him about it, he runs away. He said his name was Lance and he’s going around claiming that all of the weird stuff going on was all done by the Boogeyman!”

An uncomfortable pause passed between the people in the room. “The Boogeyman?” her Dad repeated back to her.

“He said a lot of really weird things, Dad,” she sighed, realizing he felt just as doubtful as she did.

Suddenly something echoed down the hallway, grabbing Pidge’s attention away from the round table. The noise was clearly the sound of something hard rolling against the wood floors of the school’s offices. She looked towards the door, the adults all seemingly unable to hear what she did. No one even glanced to look up when suddenly Lance rolled right into the doorway's frame on a skateboard, crashing into it with an ungraceful ‘thump!’ He was dressed back up in the casual outfit from the day before, except now his elbows and knees where covered in thick safety pads and the helmet on his head sported a comical pair of kitty ears. “That’s him!” Pidge screeched, pointed a finger towards the boy. “He’s right there!!”

“Uh-oh,” Lance gulped and quickly pushed off against the floor, turning himself around and the skateboard carrying him away as quickly as he’d appeared. Pidge jumped from the table, determined not to let him get away again. As she sprinted out the door, she could hear the scraping of chairs somewhere behind her and assumed it was the adults running to go after her.

There were people in her way, but it didn’t bother Pidge as she physically shoved past them. “Lance!” she shouted. “Lance, come back!” She could hear him somewhere down the long hallways of the school whooping in apparent joy at the skateboard. It was easy enough to follow the sound of his voice when he was so loud all the time.

She rounded the corner to the arts department, just in time to see the olive coat flicking in the breeze behind him as he sailed down the hallways. “Lance!” she shouted again, realizing she was starting to lose her breath.

The air came out of her lungs in short huffs as Lance turned and quickly pointed at a random door he saw. “Let’s hide in here!” he declared, yanking the door open and disappearing inside. It was the band room. Pidge let out another groan, but knew that if she could at least get him to stay in there until the Principal and Coran showed up, then they’d see him and believe her. They'd realize that she wasn’t making things up.

She pulled the door open, stepping inside of the dark room. Lance was standing on top of the grand piano in the center of the room, cheeks puffing and lips pressed to the reed of a saxophone. A jazzy tune was coming out, his helmet and pads already discarded, blue sunglasses firmly in place on his nose. When he saw Pidge enter, he stopped short. “Quick! Hide in the cello case! They’ll never find you!”

“Hide?” she breathed, still a little out of breath. “I was chasing YOU!”

“Chasing me?” he repeated, raising one eyebrow. Then he got dramatic. “Why ever would you do such a thing?!” He hopped off the piano with the same finesse and disregard as he had the cafeteria table earlier that day. The saxophone was quickly forgotten on top of the piano. As he breezed past her, towards the percussions corner, he reached into the pockets of his coat and produced drumsticks that looked way too long to have been able to fit there. They were wrapped in blue duct tape, a big black sharpie “L” written into the side of each one. “Trying to turn me in?! Did you think that you had me… BEAT?!” And just like that, he slammed the drumsticks down on the set before him, producing a perfect comedic rimshot before throwing the drumsticks away as quickly as he’d gotten them.

Pidge groaned. This guy really enjoyed his puns. “Once Principal Haggar finds us, she’ll realize you’re the one behind all the bad stuff happening around here!

Lance heaved a tired sigh and kept up his journey around the room, picking up a triangle somewhere along the way and tapping at it in no particular beat, but seeming to enjoy the music all the same. “Well that’s silly, I’m not behind anything! I was sent here to help you!”

“Really? By who?” she scoffed, starting to pick up on the boys patterns. He was anything if not totally and 100% distractible. All she had to do was keep him talking and eventually they’d find her.

“I told you, my head honcho.”

“There’s someone in charge of you?” she was doubtful of that fact.

“Uh, no,” he guffawed, plopping himself down in the seat in front of the band room’s beautiful standing harp, letting his fingers gently glide across it with expertise. “My HEAD,” he jabbed a finger pointedly to his own temple, “honcho. The little guy who talks to me in my head!”

“There’s a little guy who talks to you in your head?” she crossed her arms. Suddenly, this was starting to make a lot more sense. The kid was making things up, his excuses getting crazier and crazier.

“Yeah, he’s that annoying guy with an accent who talks about different universes and alternate realities,” Lance stated with his eyes closed, still somehow producing beautiful music from the harp as if he’d been playing it all his life.

“Stephen Hawking…?” Pidge wasn’t sure if he wanted her to answer him or not, but that was her best guess as to who he was referring to. She didn’t have time to see if he answered her or not because footsteps could be heard loudly echoing down the hall and someone was calling her name. It was the adults running around, trying to find her. “I found him!” she yelled out for them. “He’s in here!”

Her Dad and Coran were the first to appear in the band room’s doorway, with Haggar and Dr. Kolivan close behind, peering over their shoulders for a better look. This was perfect! That door was the only escape Lance could reasonably make from this room. And he was still behind her. So that meant he was trapped. Her plan had worked! “The weird guy who has been following me around? Your culprit behind all the weird stuff?” She held her arms out towards the harp in a wild gesture to the boy for them. “Lance!”

Her dad’s eyes drifted from the area behind her where the harp was, then slowly up to her face. He looked tired and concerned. “Pidge,” he breathed. “Maybe I oughta bring you home…”

It was quiet as Pidge tried to process what her Dad was saying. Too quiet. The music from the harp had stopped. “No,” she heard herself breathe as she quickly turned around to find the corner Lance had just been in empty. “He was here, I swear!” She whipped around, wildly looking for any sign of his presence in the room. The drumsticks. He’d tossed away his drumsticks--the ones with the tape and his initial on them! Surely that had prove something? She darted around the area of the drum set, looking for them, but they weren’t there. Like him, they’d vanished without a trace.

Her head started to spin with confusion. How could a person just disappear into thin air? It didn’t make sense! That wasn’t logical! And now he'd done it multiple times to her, leaving her more confused each time. She put a head on her head, sweeping her embarrassed eyes up to her Dad in the doorway. “I don’t…?” Her breath hitched and she could feel the tears coming on before she could stop them. “He was here!” Suddenly she was melting into ugly sobs, her Dad quickly rushing forward to hug her close to him. It made her feel like a little kid again, unable to explain what was wrong.

“Shh, Pidge it’s okay,” he comforted as best as he could. He reached a hand up to push her hair back out of her face. He was always so caring, even when the kids didn’t make sense to him. When Keith acted out at school or now with whatever seemed to be happening to Pidge. It wasn’t fair that she couldn’t prove to him what she was seeing.

“I wanna go home,” she managed to squeak out and he nodded, and as easy as that she was in her Dad’s beat up black truck, on her way home early with him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you to everyone who has left comments and kudos so far! <3


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Pidge's parents grow concerned about her behavior in school and Keith comes to her with a very important question and complaining of a big kid in the park named Lance that everyone could see but him. So Pidge decides to try and confront him again.

When the two of them had gotten home from the school, Shiro had been very insistent that Pidge go try and rest upstairs, providing her with a damp washcloth to act as a compress for her head and a swift kiss on the cheek. Sleep didn’t find her very easily, though, her head filled with confusing thoughts of boys who disappeared and calico cats that wouldn’t leave her alone. In her dreams, purple light surrounded her, coming from someplace… elsewhere. It didn’t feel like it was part of this world, a part of HER world. The wind that whipped through her hair was cold and carried voices she barely recognized.

“Katie…” one of them wheezed somewhere behind her ear. Pidge felt frozen to the spot, paralyzed in her fear. Was this sleep paralysis? She’d remembered reading about it in a health textbook once before she’d been bumped up to join the senior class. “Katie…”

The purple light cast shadows she could practically feel across her face. She found herself longing for the warmth of the familiar green light from just two nights ago. In her peripheral vision she could see long fingers slowly reaching towards her, the skin looking a sickly shade of purple, and Pidge wasn't sure if they only looked that color because of the light or not. She couldn't run. She was stuck in this dream-like state. And the fingernails that belonged to the hang were overgrown and hooked. Reaching for her. “Katie,” the voice that belonged to that hand whispered. “Katie, come out and play…”

Pidge awoke with a yell, the cloth on her face nearly dry now as it flung across the room from the force. Her lungs filled with oxygen in short, panicked breaths, her mind still filled only with thoughts of long purple fingers trying to grab her and bring her into the purple light. Was that the Boogeyman?

She quickly shook her head. No, there was no such thing as the Boogeyman, Pidge. That was child’s tale. Lance just had you talked in circles enough that you were confused and maybe for a moment, in your subconscious, had dreamed that it was real.

The doorknob of her bedroom door suddenly jiggled, causing Pidge to jump halfway out of her skin with a yelp. “Pidge, sweetie?” It was her Papa’s voice calling from behind the door. Nothing to be frightened of. The door opened a second later to reveal both her dads standing there. “Your Dad told me what happened,” her Papa crossed his arms in front of himself, his mouth twitched up in concern. “Do you wanna talk about it?”

She thought about it for a second before nodding her head. Hunk breathed a sigh of relief and let himself in to sit on the edge of her bed. “Pidge, I’m so sorry for everything that the principal tried to say to you today,” he put one hand on top of hers. “About your brother, about your old name, everything… It wasn’t right of them to bring all that up to you and try to use it against you like that. I’m going to the superintendent first thing tomorrow and giving them a piece of my mind. There’s another logical explanation for all of this. One that doesn’t involve you—you’re way too mature to be playing childish pranks like that anyways.”

Shiro stood behind Hunk, rubbing his husband's shoulder and nodding along. “You don’t have to worry, Pidge. We’re gonna make sure they find this Lance guy and find out what’s really going on. With the lockers, with the green J-Ello at swim practice, with everything…”

“Green J-Ello?” Hunk repeated, looking up at Shiro with wide eyes. “Like... like, lime J-Ello?”

Her Dad gave him a look, communicating with their eyes the way only two really great parents could do. “Right, yeah, anyways,” her Papa continued. “Moving on from the lime J-Ello. If there’s anything you need to talk about, you know we’re here. If anything they said today makes you worry about your place in this family, or—“

Pidge reacted without thinking, horror washing over. “Oh god, Pops, no!” she waved her hands around frantically. “There’s no doubts or anything! I know who I am and I’m not self-conscious about the adoption thing at all! This isn’t some kind of repressed feelings thing, or… or…”

“Okay, Pidge,” her Dad nodded from where he stood over the bed. “We understand. We just want you know that it’s okay if you do need to talk.”

“I’m fine, Dad,” Pidge breathed and started the arduous task of trying to stop the conversation where it was, ushering her parents out of her bedroom as fast as she could. When they’d finally relented (mostly so her Papa could get started on dinner), she yanked her laptop up onto her bed, quickly logging in and opening up a fresh web browser. 

No teenage boy could hide from social media these days, after all. She clicked away at her keyboard, opening Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, just about any social media website she could access easily from her computer. With a lopsided grin at her own brilliance, she clicked into the search bar, typing out the boy’s name…

L-A-N-C-E...

She mentally cursed herself as she realized that he had claimed to have no last name, his full moniker being “Lancey-Lance.” With a groan, she decided that she’d just have to search his first name only and hope he had his home location set so he’d show up as “nearby.” Facebook yielded nothing, which was frustrating but understandable. A lot of kids around her age or younger thought of Facebook as an “old person’s” social media now and just didn’t bother to get one.

Twitter was her next best bet, given that Instagram searching was hard to pin unless you knew the person’s exact handle. But, in the end, neither site showed any results for someone by the name of “Lance” in her hometown. And the ones from the towns nearby all had profile photos that clearly were NOT the bronze-skinned, chocolate-haired boy she’d spoken to only hours ago.

Maybe Nyma or Rolo had him added as a friend and he just had his privacy set so no one could search him. Twenty minutes of aimless scrolling through their friends lists later, she realized that hadn’t worked either. Another sigh and she twisted her neck to try and crack the tension out of it. She needed to stand up and stretch her legs anyways. As her weight shifted onto her feet, she could hear a strange crunching sound from her floor.

Her eyebrows knit together as she curiously looked down. A trail of broken leaves leading under her bed seemed to be the source of the noise. “Where did these come from?” she breathed, getting down on her knees on the floor to inspect them further. Her Dad was of Japanese descent, so none of them were allowed to wear shoes past the entrance way. And besides that, neither of her dads wanted to clean up after the mess of shoes trailing through the house anyways. Heck, that was half the reason Dad even pretended to care about the old custom his parents and grandparents used to make him follow.

So how did she possibly managed to trail leaves up into her bedroom? She lifted the lace that was lining the bottom of her bed, peering at the dried foliage as it seemed to disappear under the bed. Like a trail. The underside of the bed was riddled with old forgotten toys and books her dads had given her long ago about space. The leaves definitely didn’t get there by her doing.

With a “thwap!” a hand grabbed at her shoulder, sending her careening back from the edge of the bed with a mighty gasp. It was just one more shocking jolt of adrenaline on an already nerve-wracking day. She looked up at the person connected to the small hand standing by the corner of her bed. “Keith,” she breathed with relief. “What are you doing?”

He blinked at her with wide eyes and murmured something unintelligible under his breath, clearly as caught off guard by Pidge’s reaction as she’d been to his real life jumpscare. He had his ratty NASA shirt on—a gift from their dads for his eighth birthday and worn to the point where it was nearly falling apart—and his overgrown hair was pulled back in a loose ponytail.

“Sorry, what was that?” Pidge asked.

“I wanna talk to you,” he repeated, louder this time. Almost too loud.

“Okay,” she nodded for him to go on. “What do you wanna talk about.”

“Remember how you told me that scary monsters and stuff, like the Bigfoot and Mothman, weren’t real?” He was saying all this as he was pulling himself up onto her bed with a little bit of difficulty. It was a tall bed and he was a small kid.

“Yeah,” Pidge brought her eyebrows together as she stood to help him up and then sat down next to him, petting tenderly at his dark hair. She wished that he’d just let their parents bring him to get it cut. “There’s no scientific proof they exist, so clearly they have to be myth. Why?”

“Some kids at the playground down the street were talking and they said that the Boogeyman was real,” while any normal kid would have been terrified at the aspect, Keith’s eyes only seemed to light up at the thought of it. “I had to come home and ask you ‘cause you know science things!”

Pidge nodded, thoughtfully and wondered just how far this joke Lance was telling about the Boogeyman had spread. “What else did they tell you?” she asked.

“They said that the Boogeyman wants to eat children! That the only way to stay safe from him is to take your covers, and pull them right over your head at night!” he pushed his arms down and then yanked them back up, falling backwards onto Pidge’s bed to mime what he meant.

A warm smile spread across Pidge’s face as her brother demonstrated for her. She let out a chuckle. “You want the truth?” she asked, not sure if this was him looking to tell tall tales with her for fun, or if he was really seeking her out for facts to set himself straight.

“Yes!” he sat back up again quickly, straightening his NASA shirt out as he did.

“I wish I could tell you that one was real, buddy,” she tried to gently straighten his hair out as his face fell. “The Boogeyman’s just a story someone made up to scare kids into going to bed on time. There’s no scientific evidence to support the idea that the Boogeyman exists.”

“But some big kid told them—“

“That big kid should be ashamed of himself for trying to scare little kids,” Pidge shook her head. “I’m sorry buddy, I know you love your monsters. Betcha one day you’ll find a real one.” She pushed his bangs back out of his face as he hung his head, clearly disappointed. “Who told you about the Boogeyman, anyways?”

“I told you, some big kid told the other littler kids at the park and they told me! Some guy named Lance,” he was grumbling in frustration at the fact that his hopes and dreams had just been dashed once again by science, jumping off the bed and onto his feet to leave her room.

Pidge was so busy reeling over what he’d said that she almost didn’t catch him before he shut the door behind himself. Had her little brother somehow seen the very boy she’d spent the whole day (and nearly been suspended) trying to prove the existence of. “Wait, Keith?” He stopped, peering at her from the crack at the door expectantly. “What did Lance look like?”

He shrugged, contorting his face up. “I dunno,” he answered honestly. “They said they talked to him by the soccer field but I didn’t see anyone.”

“When was this?”

“A little while ago. Dad made me come home to do homework with him and I did cause i wanted to tell you about the Boogeyman.”

She nodded, feeling totally dumbfounded. Lance was at the park at the corner of the neighborhood. She could walk there now and be back before her dads even noticed she’d gone. After what had happened in the band room, and hearing Lance had filled her little brother’s head with ideas of monsters, she had more than one bone to pick with the boy.

The park was almost empty by the time she got there, parents having come from all different corners of the neighborhood to pick up their children and drag them home to force them to be responsible. Some people still laughed over by the jungle gym, though, as she hightailed past them towards the makeshift soccer field, which was really just an area they could barely get grass to grow in with two goals posted at either end. Lance was there, as Keith had claimed he’d be, and he was dribbling a dirty old soccer ball between his legs.

As she got closer, she could hear Lance narrating an imaginary game to himself. “He’s travelling down the field, he cuts wide, kicking the ball right past Tony the Tiger, he shoots…” he swiftly kicked a long leg out, sending the ball sailing towards the goal, but cutting it way too wide and sending the ball rolling, instead, off towards the nearby water fountain. “He scooooooores!!” He thrust both fists up into the air like he’d scored a touchdown at the Superbowl and proceeded to dance much the way he had earlier in the cafeteria.

“You missed the shot,” Pidge burst before she could help herself. Wow, this kid really managed to grate on her every last nerve.

He swiftly turned to take the sight of her in, his face already grinning from ear to ear. This had to have been his third wardrobe change of the day. He wasn’t wearing his normal outfit, nor the tuxedo from earlier, nor even anything remotely resembling a soccer uniform, which is what Pidge would have expected. No, instead he was wearing some sort of beat up shirt with a giant cartoon green alien face on it, white dress slacks, and some kind of unbuttoned jacket that resembled something a marching band member would wear, if they were only halfway don’t getting ready. “Are you the goalie?” he asked, pointing at the soccer ball, which clearly sat far away from the goal post.

“I’m done playing games with you, Lancey-Lance!” she crossed her arms in a huff.

“Woah, are you mad at me or something?” his face dropped from one of fun and amusement, suddenly very serious with her. As if he actually somehow cared what she thought of him.

“Yeah, I’m mad at you!” She pushed ever closer to him. “You had me seriously believing that I was seeing things that weren’t there! I got sent home from school early because of you! I cried in front of my principal, my favorite teacher...! All to come home and get told by my little brother that you’re here scaring kids with your nonsense about the Boogeyman! All you did was somehow mastermind this vicious… mass… senior prank!” she practically spat her words out at him.

His eyebrows were drawn up towards his hairline as he bit his lip, trembling from stifled laughter. “A mass, organized senior prank?” he repeated, unable to hide his giggles around the words. “Against you?”

“Yes!” It sounded crazy when he said it like that. But she stood firm in her anger and accusation. Whether it was a senior prank aimed at her or not, he was still the only person possibly responsible for it. “You had me thinking you were some kind of invisible person or—“

“Imaginary friend, is the politically correct term,” he corrected. “It’s important to get that right. Invisible people are something way different.”

“Doesn’t matter!” she snapped.

“Okay, okay, okay,” Lance heaved a sigh, tossing his head back and turning to go pick up the soccer ball some feet behind him. “So you think that me, the guy no one can hear or see, somehow convinced your entire senior class to set the alarms wrong, put J-Ello in peoples drawers, and make your best friend think you betrayed her. Is that right?”

“Yes! And egg Dr. Kolivan’s car!”

“Mhm,” he looked like he was considering it all very seriously. “And how exactly do you suggest I did this?”

“I don’t know,” she exclaimed after a beat. “Social media? Hypnosis? Brain washing? I don’t care! The point is, you did!”

Lance burst into a gut wrenching laugh again. “Brain washing?!” he repeated. “I can’t even handle you right now! And I thought my imagination was cuckoo.”

“I admit, it was most likely the social media thing,” she grumbled at his teasing.

“Okay, tell you what. You got me!” he put his hands up in the air defensively. “It was social media. Why don’t we take a selfie together to commemorate the moment you caught me?”

She blinked at him incredulously. “A selfie?!”

“Yeah! Put it on your Instabook, or whatever,” he couldn’t seem to help the giggles that were shaking his shoulders.

Clearly he was trying to make some kind of a point, so she dug a hand into her pocket and yanked her phone out. Two missed called from her dad and a text from Rolo. She swiped over to her camera, positioning herself so she was next to Lance and lifting the camera up. Last, she clicked the rotate camera button and watched as the device switched to her front-facing camera.

There, on the screen, crystal clear, she saw herself. But the area next her where Lance was softly singing some Spanish dance song was empty. All the camera picked up was the green grass on the ground below them. Her stomach dropped at the sight. “What?” she breathed, moving it around a couple different ways and taking a closer look at the phone screen, as if that would somehow turn something up. He was just… gone. Not in the shot at all. As if he had never existed there in the first place.

“I’m the INVISIBLE PERSON!” she heard Lance yelling dramatically as he bounded towards the swingset. The soccer ball bounced into the grass next her, long forgotten by the boy. “Fear me! If you cannot see me, you can’t STOP me!” 

Unable to process anything but her own confusion, Pidge ran after him. By the time she reached where he was, his legs were already swinging up past her head, already reaching a height taller than she was. “If you’re not real, how come the kids here in the park can see you?”

“Uh, duh, cause those are little kids, Pidge,” he was starting to swing so high that at the peaks of his swings, she couldn’t hear his voice too well.

“But, but I told my parents about you!” she held her arms out in a wide gaping shrug. “The principal! My guidance counselor!” As he swung forward to the highest point he could again, he took a great leap off the swing, landing gracefully on his feet behind Pidge and stomping down into the woodchips below himself. Then, he was off again, towards the log rollers a few yards away from them that had just been freed up. “Hey!” Pidge followed him as close as she could. “Are you even listening to me! What am I supposed to do?”

Lance stopped to face her with a tired expression. “Look, I don’t know, okay? They can’t see me! They’re grown-ups!” With that, he hopped himself onto the roller, kicking his feet out from underneath himself to get the log rolling. The toy was clearly not meant to be played on by someone his size.

“Stop, you’re going to hurt yourself!” Pidge huffed, holding a hand out at him.

“Can’t get hurt! Not by toys!” he was off the log roller in a flash, grabbing at the nearest monkey bars and hoisting himself up onto the platform above Pidge’s head. She was suddenly feeling very frazzled as he lost interest with everything the playground had to offer as soon as he touched it.

“Are you the one who has been doing the pranks, at least? Like the J-Ello and the sign? What about the spray paint on the lockers?” He was reaching out and swinging himself from bar to bar occasionally swinging his feet up to hook himself and hang almost upside down.

“Why would I want to pull pranks on nearly grown teenagers?” he rolled his eyes as he swung back and forth from a particularly high bar, looking down at Pidge. A light thud later signaled he’d dropped down beside her, reaching into the single back pocket of his dress pants and procuring a Phantom of the Opera-like half mask. “Please, tell me, what is my MOTIVATION?!” he dramatically whispered to her with the thin piece of paper mache pressed over his face. Then, like the drumsticks earlier, he carelessly tossed the mask aside and continued on his merry way, forgetting about it completely.

“I don’t know, you tell me!” she finally gave up. “Why are you here?”

“I told you,” Lance groaned, his head falling back at how tedious it was talking to her. She always had another question for him, demanding “why’s” or “how’s” that he didn’t feel like explaining. “The head honcho told me to come here and help! He’s the one who sent me here!” He sighed, sounding a bit frustrated with her now. “You don’t listen well, do you?” he breathed as he started flicking mindlessly at the spinning tic-tac-toe blocks on the jungle gym.

Pidge opened her mouth to respond, but found that he’d suddenly stopped moving altogether, which was something she’d never seen him do. His eyes were wide as he slowly pressed a fingertip to his ear. “Shhh…” he shushed at her, making sure she wouldn’t start blabbering on again. “Can you hear him?” he pointed at his ear for her to get close and try and listen in.

“I’m not falling for that again,” she rolled her eyes and turned away.

He nodded as if that were a perfectly acceptable answer and turned from her to listen in on a voice that Pidge highly suspected didn’t exist. She needed a break from his particular brand of pent up madness, anyways. He was a whirlwind of a person to be around. She bit at her thumbnail, taking the moment to answer her Dad’s texts and tell him she’d be home shortly. When she looked up from her phone again, Lance was no longing standing in front of her, but was physically up in a tree a few yards away, hanging from a very high branch by the crooks of his knees. “How did you get up there!?”

“Uh, I jumped,” he answered in a tone of voice that yelled ‘duh.’ The wind that rustled the trees blew his hair about as he let his arms dangle out underneath him. An almost peaceful silence passed between the two as he closed his eyes, taking in a deep inhale. Then, his blue eyes were open again and on Pidge. “Random question, I know it’s kind of touch and go in this day and age, but you seem like the right kind of nerd, so um… do you have a library card?"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thanks for reading and those of you who've left kudos so far! :)


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Pidge brings Lance to the library in search of something that can help him beat the Boogeyman, but even the simplest tasks turn into a wild ride when Lance is around

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey! So, you might have noticed that I finally added a total number of chapters! If my estimation is correct, I should finish this with eleven chapters total! Which means this is almost halfway published! wahoo!! 
> 
> enjoy reading! I'll see you at the bottom!

The library was a few blocks away from the corner park Pidge and Lance left from. Which meant that it was a few blocks of awkwardly walking beside Lance, trying to outwardly ignore him so that Pidge didn’t appear as though she were talking to herself, as he prattled on about anything and everything he could think of, from his favorite kinds of pie (“Apple and Cherry, of course!”) to admitting to her that he wasn’t sure where half is outfits came from. “Like this one,” he pointed down to the disheveled looking marching band outfit and the alien t-shirt. “I’ve worn this shirt before, or I’ve been put in this shirt before,” he pulled at the coat. “But I have no idea what this is about! Wow, it’s bright out.” He produced the familiar blue-lens sunglasses from his pocket and slid them up his nose.

“You don’t change your clothes yourself?” Pidge mumbled as inconspicuously as she could. After one passerby out walking his dog had given her a nervous look for conversing with a person he couldn’t see, she’d decided it best to just let Lance do the majority of the talking for now.

“Nope! I just get imagined up in these clothes,” Lance said. “Even when I’m not with a kid, it’s just totally random. Actually, I wonder who is the one doing the imagining now that I’m not with my kid,” he sounded thoughtful. It left him silent for a minute, and Pidge found herself curious, but feeling like she shouldn't pry. It wasn't often that Lance was actually quiet, but whenever he was, it left a dark feeling inside of her. Like sadness, but more wrong than that. So she stayed quiet as per usual and instead cast him a questioning eyebrow. “No, no, no, don’t give me that look! I have a kid! A great kid! I’ve just also got this mission the Head Honcho sent me on. Gotta beat the Boogeyman! Once I do, then I can go back to doing what I do best. Then I can go back to my kid… I think.”

She decided to veer the subject away from that, since he seemed so unsure about it. “Why do you have to be the one to beat the Boogeyman?”

“Not sure!” he stuffed his hands into the pockets of his slacks and gave a great shrug. “Hoping I’ll find that out, but the Head Honcho likes to leave things on a need-to-know basis. Bad idea messing with alternate realities, he says. I just like to think he chose me because of my extreme professionalism!” He shot her some finger guns as if that were demonstration of said professionalism.

“Alternate realities?” she repeated. Thankfully, no one appeared to be walking around this neighborhood as they rounded the corner towards the library.

“Yeah! Everything comes from somewhere! Where do you think imaginary friends and the Boogeyman all come from?”

The corners of Pidge’s lip turned up in a sly grin. “My imagination,” she answered.

Lance seemed to find that very funny as he threw his head back and a laugh burst from somewhere in his chest. “So you admit that I am an imaginary friend and not some part of a great conspiracy?”

She considered this for a moment. The only proof she had was conditional on how much she trusted that the whole town was being earnest in the fact that they couldn’t see him. Although, she figured, the more people involved, the less likely it was that it was some sort of organized joke. The probability of her whole town being in on it, even down to one random dude walking his dog, was very low. Still… “I dunno,” she breathed with a shrug.

Every now and then they’d pass by a young child who would reach out to try and point out the “funny looking marching band guy” to their parents, or Lance would offer up a high five to a kid breezing by on their bike and they’d take it. But that couldn’t have prepared Pidge for the happened when they finally reached the library.

There was a large cluster of children there for some sort of after school program, seated on a big fuzzy carpet watching an old video of Bill Nye the Science Guy that Pidge recognized fondly. “Okay, let’s find the book the Head Honcho wants you to get and then leave,” she said, turning away from the kids to face her invisible partner in crime, but he was gone. “Lance?! Lance?”

The kids behind her suddenly erupted in cheers as the soft noise from the television cut out. Pidge quickly turned back, just in time to see Lance yanking the old tape out of it’s deck with a grimace on his face. “Who still owns and uses VHS’?!” he exclaimed, clearly having no concept of being quiet in the library. “Let’s get some Netflix on in this joint!” He tossed the tape aside and started pressing at buttons on the television, trying to access the apps menu. “Who here likes Stranger Things?!”

“Mommy says I’m not allowed to watch it cause it’s too scary and I’m too little!” one boy loudly pointed out to him with a hand raised up in the air.

Lance shot him an impressive grin and got down on a bent knee so that he was eye to eye with the boy. “Oh yeah?” he asked, doing some sort of made-up secret handshake the kid seemed to know perfectly. “How old are you now?”

Pidge twisted her head around as he animatedly began to interact with the kids, their voices all growing louder as they became more enthralled with the imaginary friend. After a few moments, the librarian took notice of the commotion and turned a corner to lean in and remind them all to use their inside voices.

“Whoops,” Lance made a face at the kids before putting a finger to his lips, eliciting a few muted giggles from all the children, and turning back to the television. After a few swift presses of the buttons lining the bottom, he managed to access the television's streaming app and grinned from ear to ear. “Well, fine, no Stranger Things then! How abooooout…?” he scrolled through the options until he found one he must’ve decided he liked and suddenly a loud animated theme song was blaring through the speaker.

The kids all cheered and moved closer to the screen as a cartoon about some sort of large robotic cats began. “Now, since you seem to know all about the scary stuff, kiddo,” Lance sat himself back down in front of the boy who had spoken up before, criss-cross applesauce style. “Can you tell me where I might find some books on creepy monsters?”

The boy nodded, his overgrown blonde hair falling into his face. “There’s some Goosebumps books in the big kids’ section,” he answered proudly.

Lance thought about it and then pressed his two first fingers to his ear, like he was hearing the voice of the Head Honcho again. “No, no, my boss says I’m looking more for some kind of reference book,” he said. “Think like a textbook full of scary things.”

“There is such a thing as a card catalog,” Pidge sighed.

“Uh, this book won’t be in the card catalog,” Lance chuckled and pointed at Pidge with his thumb, giving the boy a very “can you believe this girl?” sort of look. It sent the kid into a fit of giggles that attracted the librarian’s attention again.

“Maybe by the maps and stuff,” the boy finally answered as the librarian rose from her desk to come see what all the commotion was about. “If you wanna find monsters, you need a map to where the monsters are!”

Lance’s eyes lit up at the suggestion and he offered the kid a high five. “A treasure map to find monsters! You’re brilliant, little man, I’ll check over there right now!” he stood and ushered Pidge away with him before the increasingly suspicious librarian could catch them near the kids.

They darted down an aisle lined with atlas' and geography books. Pidge watched through the bookshelves as the librarian came over and saw the Bill Nye video tossed aside on the floor. Her jaw nearly dropped when she realized the television was tuned into a scif-fi cartoon instead of the educational material she'd provided. “Who touched the equipment?” she asked the children, who all just giggled in response. None of them were snitching on Lance, as if they knew somehow that even if they told, she would never see the culprit. Frustrated with their silence, the librarian switched it back to the Bill Nye tape and reminded the children to keep their voices down.

“You’re gonna get those kids in trouble,” Pidge murmured, nudging Lance in his ribcage as he sifted through all the books on the shelf.

“Hm?” he looked up through the books to where Pidge was and clicked his tongue. “Did she change it? Rude!” He made a grand gesture of snapping his fingers and suddenly the cartoon roared back to life on the screen. The kids all gasped and started pointing and loudly checking to make sure everyone had seen what had happened. It was like magic, and they reacted as such. “They’ve been at school all day, let them have some fun.” And just like that, Lance was back to looking for his book, as if what he'd just done was no big deal at all.

“How did you do that?” Pidge’s jaw dropped and she ran to peer around the bookshelf and get a better view. Her eyes didn’t betray her, the television really was back to the Netflix app.

“This is it!!” Lance shouted, pulling a heavy, leather-bound book from the shelf. It was huge, there was no way it had been there before Pidge’s back had been turned. They would have seen it. She stared with wide eyes and shook her head, unable to process what she was seeing. “ _A Theory of Boogey_ ,” Lance read the title page out loud, guiding himself along the words with one finger. “By Slav.”

“Slav?” she questioned.

“That’s the Head Honcho guy,” he answered with an eye roll. She wasn’t sure if the gesture had been directed at her or at Slav.

“No, you’ve never said his name before now, how do I know you’re not making that up?”

Lance sighed and lifted the open book up to her, and she took it, staring at the yellowed pages. “Read the dedication," he directed, nonchalantly.

She knit her eyebrows together, still unsure if she believed him as she flipped to the next page. When her eyes finally locked onto the dedication, she was floored. There, on a page every bit was weathered and worn as the rest of the book, was indeed a typed out dedication. All she could find the willpower to do was read it out loud back to him. “In case of this book finding it’s way into the 23% of realities where there’s a 67% chance that this book falls into the hands of someone else, I hereby write this dedication so that it may be known that this book was 100% written for use by and in dedication to… Lancey-Lance.”

“Sounds like Slav,” Lance sighed with a smug look on his face. “He’s always spewing out numbers and stuff like that and I can never understand it!” He quickly yanked the book back from Pidge and started flipping through the pages too quickly to actually be reading any of it.

“No,” she shook her head in her unwillingness to accept anything that he was telling her. “That doesn’t prove anything! Anyone can type out a fake dedication page.”

“What, so you think I made and aged a fake page, pulled this ancient book apart, inserted the fake page, and then rebound the leather cover… all for a joke?” he raised an eyebrow over his shoulder at her.

“What?!” Pidge heard her voice getting loud right as the librarian peered over the shush her. “Sorry…” she breathed. She looked back over his shoulder at the worn, nearly crumbling pages. There was no real mistaking the age in this object anyways. “No, I guess you’re right… But if this book was written for you and the book is this old… Then how old are you?”

Lance made an offended face. “Not that old!” his voice raised an octave in his own defense. “Look, this book has probably been through every reality just to get to this one, don’t make fun it! And don’t make fun of me! I’m ageless… timeless, in fact!” He was almost too defensive about the subject.

The television show the children were watching blared with loud sound effects as a cartoon battle commenced, and the kids reacted with excitement as the robotic lions all combined into an even bigger robot. “Ooh, this is my favorite part!” Lance pushed the book into Pidge’s arms and ran over to join them.

“Lance!”

He was already sitting himself down on the fuzzy carpet next to the blonde-haired boy from before when the loud music attracted the attention of the librarian again. She did not look pleased. “Who changed the channel again?” she demanded, pulling her glasses off.

Some of the kids hesitantly started to point chubby little fingers towards Lance, and he feigned offense at them tattling. But, to the very much adult librarian,  it must have looked like they were pointing at the blonde boy. “Lotor,” she demanded. “How many times have I told you not to change the programming?”

“I didn’t do it,” the kid waved a hand towards Lance, but he was giggling still. Not even mad at Lance for getting him in trouble. “The big kid did!”

“Yeah, Lotor, don’t change the programming,” Lance playfully pushed the boy over and stood up, sauntering towards the librarian, who was looking right past him and down at the laughing kids.

“Well, whoever did it, don’t do it again,” she replied sternly. Lance openly mocked her in a squeaky voice as he grabbed the tape before she could look for it, slipping it into his pocket with ease. Once again, Pidge noted that his pocket did not look anywhere near big enough to possibly hold the items he always seemed to have on his person.

When the tape turned up missing, she quickly turned towards the kids in shock. “Where is the Science guy tape?” she asked, looking around wildly.

“WHERE IS THE TAPE?!” Lance boomed dramatically as he climbed to stand on a nearby desk, pulling the marching band jacket off and tossing it aside.  

The kids found this to be hilarious and tried to convince her that they didn’t have it, despite the fact that she clearly didn’t believe them. “He took it! The big kid!” the chorus of small voices laughed as Lance proceeded to do a funny little chicken dance behind the shrill woman. She didn’t even notice and the kids’ voices were only getting louder.

“That’s it!” she snapped, turning the television off altogether. “If you can’t behave, then we’re having quiet time until it’s pick up time!”

“Aww,” the kids faces all fell, but Lance quickly put a finger to his lips, crawling off of the desk. Despite all of the chaos he'd managed to cause, including getting them into trouble, they all gave little nods to show that they understood. They played nice and pretended to stay silent until the librarian stalked away, passing Pidge on her way towards her desk. Pidge watched her and when she turned back, Lance was gone.

She darted over to the young blonde boy, Lotor. “Where did he go?” she whispered. “Where’d the big kid go?”

The child just smiled at her and pointed a finger up at the tv screen. Moments later, it burst to life again. Pidge couldn’t believe her eyes; There, in the cartoon about space lions, in shiny white and blue armor, was none other than Lance himself. The tanned skin and blue eyes were unmistakable, even in a cartoon, even with a helmet on. “Lance!?” she put a hand to the screen.

“Oh hey, Pidgeon!” he turned and waved to her as if he had actually somehow managed to hear her through the screen. He readjusted his helmet as he got closer to the proverbial fourth wall. “Move aside for the kids, could you? I gotta tell them all about the Boogeyman! So they can stay safe just in case.”

“I can’t believe this,” Pidge breathed, feeling somewhat stunned. But she stumbled away from the screen anyways, not having the desire to fight him on this.

Even in her own logical mind, she didn’t know how to deny the truth of what she was seeing with her own eyes. She floated back from the after school area as Lance started explaining to the kids in a playful voice how to protect themselves in case a Boogeyman comes into their house. “And remember, if you do think that he’s in your home, just pull the covers over your head. The Boogeyman is nothing if not dumb. So, if he can’t see you, then he can’t get you!”

 Trying to check out the book proved to be a hassle for Pidge as  _The Theory of Boogey_  wasn’t anywhere to be found in the library’s databases. The librarian had even tried called calling other locations that shared the same database and no one could find anything about the book. In the end, Pidge only really kept pressing the matter to serve as a distraction as the kids erupted into noise when Lance actually, physically climbed out of the tv, armor and all.

On the walk back home, Pidge tried multiple times to convince herself (and Lance) that he had to actually be some sort of alien from another planet and that the voice inside of his head was actually coming from a mothership somewhere. “Boy, you really took that Netflix cartoon way too seriously,” Lance laughed at her as he flipped through the book, unfolding diagrams and hand-drawn charts that Pidge found herself barely understanding. “The Boogeyman isn’t some alien! He lives under your bed.”

“What?”

“The book says it right here,” he pointed to the page with a gloved hand, still decked out in the sci-fi armor from the cartoon he’d literally crawled out of. The only difference is he’d removed his helmet once they’d managed to leave the library, book in tow. “It says ‘the Boogeyman lives under your bed.’ It doesn’t say which bed, but leave it to Slav to leave out all the important details.”

“If Slav wrote this book for you, wouldn’t it be your bed?” Pidge scoffed, remembering the books dedication page from earlier that day.

“Imaginary friends don’t have beds,” Lance answered without bothering to look up at her. “We don’t sleep.”

“Right…”

“Man, it’s bright out,” he mumbled, folding the book closed and reaching deep into his armor to pull out his sunglasses once more.

“It’s not that bright out,” Pidge looked up at the sky, which was grey and overcast. They were almost back to her house by now, thankfully. It looked like it was going to rain. Still, his insistence on the brightness struck her as odd. She thought back over all the weird things that had happened, trying to piece together some other sort of good explanation for what she’d seen. “So, if what you’re saying is true… and you are an imaginary friend… that boy at the library. Lotor? Is he your kid? You seemed to know him.”

Lance laughed and shook his head. “No way, kids just like me. Comes with the territory,” he answered, glancing up from the book. “No, my kid would have probably attacked that librarian for blaming him for the tv stuff.”

“Who is your kid?” Pidge hesitantly asked, feeling weird about the question. As if she were prying too much.

“I think the Boogeyman must be under your bed,” Lance continued on as if he hadn’t even heard her.

“What? Why?”

“Well, you’re the one he’s targeting, right?”

“Don’t you think I’d notice if there was something living under my bed?” Pidge rolled her eyes at the very idea.

“Adults don’t notice a lot of things,” Lance answered with a short laugh. “That’s why kids never get questioned about the existence of us.” He pointed a hand towards his own chest, indicating that he meant “us” as in imaginary friends.

“There’s nothing living under my bed, imaginary or not,” Pidge groaned. Even if she could maybe somehow eventually bring herself to admit that Lance was real and being honest about being imaginary, she still couldn’t believe in a scary story. The Boogeyman was a fairy tale.  

“Oh really?”

“Really!”

“Have you,” Lance was edging on getting competitive with the short girl, “looked lately?”

She paused, blinking at him dumbly. “Have I looked under my bed recently?” she repeated the question. Despite knowing what he was doing, she was 100% taking the bait. She wanted to prove him wrong that badly. “Well, let’s go look together, then!”

“Fine!” he tucked the book under his arm like he was carrying a football. She pushed past him up to her front doorway, but he didn’t follow. Must not want to be proved wrong, she thought to herself and turned on her heel back to him. “Are you coming or not?”

But he was gone again. Vanished into thin air just like he had done so many times already. Only this time, Pidge wasn’t certain how he’d managed to get away without her hearing the hard surface of his armor making any movement.

She blinked at the empty sidewalk. “Lance?!” she called out, but there came no answer. She shook her head in confusion. Maybe he was inside already? Despite not knowing how he managed to slip past her and into the house, she turned and headed inside herself. As she walked up her lawn, the green-eyed cat meowed at her from where the five of them had seemingly decided to make a home in the bushes next to her porch.

Pidge made it as far as the staircase before her parents rounded the doorway from the kitchen, demanding to know where she’d been and why she missed dinner. “I texted you at least three times, Pidge!” Dad crossed his arms over his chest. “You know you’re not supposed to go anywhere without telling us first!”

“I just went to the library,” Pidge bit her lower lip, mentally slapping herself for forgetting that she’d texted her Dad saying she would only be gone for a few minutes. It had been at least an hour and a half since then. It was nearly dark now. “I needed to study… missed classes and stuff from today.”

“Honey, you just worried us,” Papa put a hand on her shoulder. “Especially after everything that happened today.”

“And really, you only missed two classes,” her Dad interrupted. “Pidge, after today you need to rest. Take it easy. Missing two classes isn’t going to hurt you.”

“I’m sorry, okay?” Pidge murmured, avoiding eye contact. There was no good way to explain to her parents that she’d been dragged along on a crazy mission for an old book by the very person she had claimed caused all the trouble for her at school. The same person she had no proof existed. They looked down at her with equally disappointed looks, which was something she couldn’t stand to bear. “Can I please just go to my room?”

They relented with a sigh, letting her retreat up the stairs. “Oh and Pidge?” Hunk called before she could turn out of his line of sight and into her bedroom. She looked back at her Papa without a word. “Just so you know, we’ve invited the counselor from your school over for dinner the weekend.”

“Coran?”

“Yes,” he replied. “Listen, honey, we just want to talk with him as a family about what’s been going on with you at school. Maybe skipping two grades was just too much all at once, or if there’s anyone bullying you—“

“Oh my god, Pops!” Pidge groaned loudly, running a hand through her hair.

“All I’m saying is that we need to talk about this as a family!”

“This isn’t some kind of repressed anger thing, Pops! It’s just—“ she stopped, searching for the words, any words at all, to fit the situation. “It’s just been a hard week, okay?”

Hunk stared up at her, his eyes searching for some sign or clue that wasn’t there. “Your Dad and I just want to understand what’s going on with you.”

“There’s nothing to understand,” she sighed before retreating into her room and shutting the door behind her. As soon as she was sure that her dads weren’t going to try and follow her into her room, she heaved another heavy sigh and glanced over at her dresser, the top of it filled with framed pictures and mementos from her childhood. She ran a finger along the curled white hair of her only doll. It was the first toy they’d ever given her, when she and Matt had been placed with their dads. It had quickly became her favorite toy, if the smudges on her dark porcelain skin were any indication. From there she lifted up a picture of her dads at Keith’s last birthday party, his dark hair just barely starting to grow back in after the chemo. She chuckled at the sight. Now he wouldn’t dare let anyone cut it, too scared to part with his hair, even though it had started to grow out into an awkward looking mullet.

Somehow this imaginary friend had her actually, actively disappointing her parents. Her family, who had spent her whole life making sure she knew how loved she was. It broke her heart to push them away from this, but there was no way to explain to them what was happening. They’d think she was crazy for seeing someone who probably wasn’t there… and who knows what would happen to her family then? Keith was just finally feeling stable in his environment and she could easily ruin that by being selfish. She didn’t have any room for error. So instead, she decided then and there, she'd have to keep them in the dark about this. She could handle the Boogey problem on her own, if it was real.

Speaking of the Boogey problem… her eyes gazed up towards her bed as she gently set the picture back down. Lance had said that the Boogeyman was targeting her, which meant that he probably had to be living underneath her bed. But how could anything actually be living underneath her bed without her noticing it? Not to mention the idea of anything person-sized being able to fit underneath there for an extended amount of time was just pure silliness. It didn’t make sense.

But leave it to a silly boy, convinced he’s an imaginary friend, to come up with the idea. It just meant Pidge had to prove him wrong. She took a deep breath to calm herself, not sure why she felt so anxious about something as simple as looking under her bed. “You’re not a child anymore, Pidge,” she told herself. “It’s now or never…”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I just realized while editing this chapter to post it, that I'm publishing the chapter that mentions Stranger Things on the day that Stranger Things season two came out! That was totally unintentional, but I honestly couldn't have planned it any better and it made me laugh when i realized it just now! :'D
> 
> As always, i hope you enjoyed this chapter! leave a comment/kudos if you like!


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Pidge finds out who Lance is the imaginary friend of and another prank targets Pidge herself this time. The Boogeyman arrives and gives Lance a terrifying warning.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy Halloween bbys!! Hope y'all had a great spoopy time <3

Pidge kneeled beside her bed, breathing in and out slowly. Her nerves felt fried after such a long day and being told that a real life monster was living under her bed, whether she believed that monster was real or not, didn’t exactly help. Every time she had herself calm enough to reach a hand out towards the lace trimming the foot of her bed, her nerves jumped and she would pull back again. She did this at least three times.

Okay, she finally decided. She was taking this too slow and working herself up. She needed to do it like ripping off a bandaid. Quick and almost painless. On three she was diving in. No excuses. One…

Two…

Three—

She pulled the covers back fast and shoved her head down under the bed before she could change her mind again. It was… dark. As the underside of the bed typically was. But this was darker than she’d expected.

“You know for someone who doesn’t believe in the Boogeyman, you sure seem scared right now,” Lance’s ear was suddenly right behind her ear. “You don’t even have your eyes open!”

In all of her life, Pidge had never been so scared that she actually screamed. She did a haunted house with Matt and Dad every year (Papa didn’t go because it scared him too much and because Keith was decidedly too young, much to his chagrin) and she had never screamed once there. She got through every haunted movie with no more than a peep, not even anything more than a pointed laugh at the stupidity of the characters onscreen.

But kneeling at the foot of her bed, being startled by an imaginary friend who only she could see. That made her scream.

“Lance!” she hissed through her teeth, clutching at her chest. Her heart was pounding.

“He’s not under there right now,” he shrugged, plopping himself down on the bed. “It’s still daylight.”

Pidge noticed Lance was back in the olive coat. It seemed to be the one thing he ended up wearing the most. “So what’s with that outfit?” she asked, referring to their earlier conversation where Lance had admitted he didn’t end up choosing what outfits he’d appear in. Sure, it was an abrupt change of subject, but anything to deflect from the way her heart was currently pounding was welcome at the moment. “That’s the one I see you in the most.”

“Hm?” he glanced down at the green coat, pulling on it a little as if examining it. “I dunno,” he said. “My kid likes space movies so I think I’m probably some kind of cargo pilot. Cargo jacket equals cargo pilot, maybe?” He laughed. “That’s kid logic.”

Pidge nodded, feeling her heart rate starting to return to normal. A moment later Lance had himself adjusted on her bed so that he lay on his stomach, the thick leather-bound book open before him. He wasn’t saying anything, biting at his fingernail as he read. “Anything good?” she eventually prodded.

“Yeah, it says here that there’s this thing you can build to get to the other reality,” he nodded, pointing to a hand drawn diagram in the book. “Something called a teludav. It’ll make kind of a wormhole sort of thing, like a portal for you and me to get to the reality where the Boogeyman lives.”

“Lance, you have your sneakers on my bed,” Pidge complained as she got up to take a good look at the diagram, readjusting her glasses on her nose. Lance quickly bent his knees upwards so his feet were swinging up to kick himself in the butt, as if that were the solution to the sneakers on the bed. “I mean, it looks easy enough to build. But technology that easy can’t possible be realistic when it comes to travelling to another dimension—“

“Another reality,” he corrected.

“Whatever! And besides, the science behind wormholes and travelling between realities isn’t anywhere near complete. We barely understand how it all works, let alone how to get there.”

“Listen, Neil Degrasse Tyson,” Lance sighed. “Never doubt anything Slav says. I never understand a thing the Head Honcho says or where he comes from, but he’s never proved me wrong. There’s a reason he’s the Head Honcho. And besides, who needs science when it’s all imaginary anyways?”

“The pranks being pulled around school are anything but imaginary,” Pidge sighed.

“Who are you talking to?” came an incredulous voice from the entrance to the room. Pidge turned on her heel to face the source. It was Keith, peeking his head inside the just barely opened door. She must have been concentrating so hard on the science behind what Lance was suggesting that she hadn’t even heard him open it.

“Keith!” Lance exclaimed excitedly, jumping from the bed and running over to him. He knelt down on the floor in front of Pidge, the book and troubles with the Boogeyman entirely forgotten.

“Uh, I was just… doing some homework,” Pidge mumbled, not sure what to say. Keith acted like he didn’t see Lance, looking only up at her, despite the fact that the boy had just called out his name and run up to him. With Keith’s normally standoffish demeanor, that kind of outburst usually would have startled him. “Research for a… project… I’m working on… Keith, what did you need?”

“Keith, come on, man, it’s me! Lance!” the bronze-skinned boy looked at him with pleading eyes.

“I found some old space toys in Matt’s room and I think they’re yours,” Keith answered, still not responding to Lance at all. Pidge sat on the edge of her bed, observing the strange interaction… or lack of interaction. Keith's voice sounded hesitant, probably because he could read Pidge’s unexpectedly stunned expression and didn’t know what to make of it.

“How do you know Keith?” Pidge whispered to Lance, but Keith took the question as his.

“Well Matt said they weren’t his toys, so they gotta be yours.”

“Keith, come on,” Lance’s voice begged. “Stop acting like you can’t see me, it’s me! Lancey-Lance!”

Pidge was almost too amazed to answer. The boy who had passed by them on his bike earlier that afternoon had been older than Keith and he’d been able to see Lance perfectly fine. But here her little brother stood and didn’t even realize there was anyone else in the room, even though Lance clearly recognized him.

She stayed silent too long and Keith got impatient with her lack of answer to his question. “So are the toys yours? Dad told me to ask you if I could have them.”

“Keith, do you see anyone else in this room?” Pidge asked, giving a pointed look directly at Lance. Maybe he just needed a little push.

But that didn’t seem to do the trick. In fact, it did the opposite. Keith’s face tempered a shade of red and he frowned. “You don’t have to be rude about it! Keep the stupid toys!” he turned and stomped from the room. “I didn’t want them anyways.”

“Keith, wait!” Lance’s face was desperate as he stood to try and follow the small boy from the room. “Don’t do this! Don’t leave!”

Pidge stood, too, following the two from the room. Keith was halfway to his own room, looking absolutely rejected by his sister’s weird response towards his simple question. “Keith, why are you ignoring me?” Lance kept trying to call after him. “Do you not want to be friends anymore?! Keith!!” The youngest boy’s bedroom door slammed shut in his face, unintentionally rejecting Lance in turn.

“Lance?” Pidge's voice was cautious and quiet, so as not to draw attention to herself. “Are you Keith’s imaginary friend?” He put one hand on the door, turning his eyes downward towards the floor at the question. Like always, Pidge noticed, silence from Lance only ever felt sad. “Lance?”

“I didn’t know he was your brother, okay?” he finally sighed in a way that stung. It was as if he thought Pidge was going to be mad that he didn’t tell her. Which couldn’t have been more opposite from how she was actually feeling. She almost felt guilty, like she was invading her little brother’s privacy or pushing answers from Lance.

“Keith, please,” Lance said to the door, not knowing how to stop. “I’m right here, please don’t push me away!” He drummed his fingers on the door with a sigh. “Keith, I think the Boogeyman might be here in your house! You’ve gotta stay safe, buddy. Pull the covers over your head so he can’t see you!” Nothing but silence came from the room.

It was a while before Lance finally pulled himself away from the door. “I don’t get it,” he breathed as he pushed past Pidge into her room. “It’s like he doesn’t even see me.” He fell forwards onto Pidge’s bed with an ungraceful flop.

“Well, yeah,” she answered, drifting back into her room, not sure what to say. She felt a mix of emotions. On one hand, she was almost sad for Lance and on the other, she still wasn’t sure if she believed he was an imaginary friend at all. Then again, Keith would never lie to her for the sake of a prank. So the fact that he hadn’t seen Lance was some pretty damning evidence. “He doesn’t believe in that sort of stuff,” she continued, not sure who she was trying to convince. “Imaginary friends and monsters? I told him it was all make believe when he went into remission and the kids at school started getting him obsessed with monster stories.”

“You told him it was all fake?” Lance repeated, not even turning his head to look up at her. His voice had a rasp to it and she questioned for a moment if maybe he was crying. Tears seemed pretty far for a joke.

“Yes, it’s childish for him to believe in things like that! He was just getting over the leukemia, he was starting public school for the first time and the kids were frightening him by telling him about things like Mothman and Bigfoot!”

The air shifted suddenly as Lance slowly turned his head to look up at where Pidge was standing next to him. His eyes had shifted, their normally radiant shade of blue gone. Instead, his pupils were thin, and the iris’ had taken on an alarming yellow shade. They almost looked as if they were glowing. “You did this,” he breathed at her, an intimidating growl to his voice.

Pidge pressed herself to the wall with a gasp. “Lance?!”

He sprang from the bed, drawing so close to her that she could almost feel the huffs of his breath as he snapped, shoving a finger in her face. “You told him I wasn’t real! You’re the reason why he doesn’t believe in me anymore!” His voice wasn’t the same friendly tone he usually took on. No, he was nearly yelling and it sounded almost threatening. It sent a chill down her spine.

“H-how did you do that with your eyes…?” she finally managed to stutter out, finding herself unable to form any of the other questions that popped into her mind. Fear had taken away her ability to properly form any questions that weren’t stupid, apparently.

But it seemed to snap Lance out of whatever funk he’d gotten himself into. He jerked his hand back away from her face, pressing his fingers up to his eyes instead. Stumbling backwards, he shook his head. “I don’t—“ he turned away, leaning to support himself on the post of her bed, stumbling over his words and clearing his throat until his voice went back to normal. “Must be something in the air. Allergies or something.”

“Your eyes were yellow, dude,” Pidge’s breath hitched in her chest. “Allergies don’t do that.”

“You know what, you just know EVERYTHING, don’t you Pidge?!” he burst again, kicking at her desk chair and knocking it onto it’s side. “You NEED to know everything. That’s why you told Keith to stop believing in me! Just had to PROVE you knew more than he did!” His face was tinged with red around his cheeks, but his eyes had returned to their normal blue color.

Pidge flared with anger at the accusation, her voice cracking. “Don’t tell me what I do or don't know,” her voice sounded thicker than she meant for it to. “Keith was sick! And we didn’t know if he’d live! He needed to believe in science and doctors, not fairytales! He was scared enough without thinking that monsters and Boogeymen were real!”

“So you really proved him wrong, didn’t you Pidge?” Lance growled. “Keith _loves_  all that creepy stuff and you just shut him down! Bet that made you feel real good about yourself.”

“That’s how you stop being scared, Lance! You grow up and you learn to deal with what’s real!” Pidge could feel tears springing into her eyes. Who the hell was he to question everything she knew about her relationship with her own brother.

“If you were so concerned about his wellbeing, why not give him your bone marrow when he was sick?!”

“That’s not how it works, Lance! I wasn’t a match! We’re adopted! You don’t think we tried?!”

“Oh thank god,” Lance openly mocked her. “What a relief that must have been!”

“I wanted to help him, trust me, but I—“

“So you told him to that the one friend he had wasn’t real. Yeah that’s real helpful, Pidgeon.”

“Stop calling me that! My name is Pidge!”

“You know what, you’re right. Pidgeon isn’t the right kind of bird to describe you,” Lance’s voice was like poison. “You’re more like a chicken, frankly.” Suddenly he had some sort of a rubber chicken in his hand, which Pidge would have assumed he’d produced from his magical endless pockets, if she cared enough right that moment to question it. Now, however, it was just another one of his distractions that he seemed to live on.

“Stop it, Lance!”

“Don’t lie to me, Pidge!” he growled. “I know all about making things up.” He jabbed a finger at the fake bird in his hand before throwing it on the floor and turning for the stairway. Pidge hadn’t even noticed until that moment that he’d been backing towards the door in his anger.

“Lance, wait!” she snapped, trying to chase after him, but he was already gone. He's disappeared into thin air once again. She could feel her frustration bubbling up inside of her. If this still was all a joke, it was getting less funny every minute.

Pidge didn’t know why her argument with Lance had upset her so much. Well, she knew he’d somehow managed to pick at the exact things she didn’t even know she was insecure about, but the fact that the argument had been with Lance was what confused her. Why did she care what some guy, who had spent their every moment together lying to her, thought? Ever since she’d met him, all he’d ever done was keep up this charade of being an imaginary person. And now he was using it to turn her relationship with Keith around. By all accounts, Lance was not the type of person she should waste her time being upset by.

Maybe she’d just been spooked by his eyes, she eventually figured. Their unnatural yellow color stayed fresh in her mind the whole night, keeping her tossing through her dreams. His eyes hadn’t even looked human anymore. They had resembled something similar to a cat’s.

In her dreams that night, the yellow pierced through her and she found herself reminded of Green again. But that wasn’t right, the calico cat had green eyes, that’s why she was calling it “Green.” No, wait, that name meant something else to her… Like a distant memory, glowing yellow eyes shined down on her, but they weren’t Lance’s or even the young cat’s eyes. No, the gaze that had her locked in view now was mechanical and familiar. It belonged to a hulking silver and green vessel. Tears sprang to her eyes as memories of her times in the sky with the ship poured through her head with a rumble. No, a purr. She’d come here in her dreams before. Before imaginary men and school drama had taken over her every waking thought. “Green?” she reached a hand out towards the great mechanical beast that stood before her.

The lion faded away like smoke, wisps flying away towards the stars before she could grab onto them. She finally stopped trying to catch them when she noticed her own glove-covered hand, letting her own eyes wander over herself. What she was wearing looked familiar and she recognized it almost instantly. After all, Lance had been wearing nearly the exact same thing when they’d left the library. Except hers was an emerald green color, perfectly matching the ship who visited her here in her dreams. It was armor.

The final wisps of smoke and dust cleared as the wind picked up around Pidge. Softly, the air carried a whisper of a voice. “Katie…”

Pidge turned to look over her shoulder, a weapon appearing in her hand instinctively. She wasn’t even sure how she knew that it was a weapon. At first glance, it just looked like a plastic toy vaguely resembling the letter “H.” A fake weapon if she'd ever saw one. But somehow, with it in her hand, she knew she was safe. “Katie, come out and play… Katie…”

“Pidge,” a second voice called from somewhere far away. This voice wasn’t a whisper like the first one, but instead it sounded more like a far away shout. Pidge could feel a pressure on her shoulder, pulling her from the dream. Just as the lion had before, the world around her began to crumble into dust. “Pidge, wake up…”

She could feel someone shaking her awake by her shoulder and groaned, shoving her face in pillow. When she squeezed one eye open, she wasn’t in armor anymore and had no weapons. Not unless you counted a floral, lacy bedspread as a weapon, that is. “What?” she mumbled as she realized she’d been woken up.

“The Boogeyman is here,” the voice whined, shaking her still. She huffed loudly and flipped onto her back to glare up at Lance, but stopped short when she was met with his again-yellow eyes. “Get up, Pidge! He’s up on the roof!”

Minutes later Pidge found herself outside of her house in an oversized hoodie, her hair sticking in every which direction, and freezing her butt off. She wasn’t happy about this. Was it possible to kill an imaginary friend? Because she was currently toying with the idea as she squinted up into the darkness, trying to see any sign of… well, anything… on her roof.

“What do you see?” Lance bounced on the balls of his feet, stretching himself as far as his long limbs could take him to try and crane himself up to a better view. At some point on the journey downstairs, his eyes had gone back to their normal, happy-go-lucky blue gleam. Probably around the same time he’d changed his clothes, she figured. This time it was a beaten up blue, white and red leather jacket with dark, faded black jeans. He had some sort of complicated looking belt wrapped around his waist, frankly making him look like a comic book or, even, a video game character. It was probably the most comical outfit yet, if Pidge was being honest. “Is the Boogeyman up there? Do you see him?” he kept asking over and over again, but she couldn’t force herself to see what wasn’t there.

“Lance, I don’t see anything,” she yawned. “Just a bunch of Christmas lights.”

“Ding ding ding,” Lance exclaimed, producing the same triangle from the band room earlier that week from his pocket and banging on it. “When did your dads put up Christmas lights!? And why?! It’s the middle of October!”

Pidge blinked up at the roof as his words sank through the fog of sleep that was clouding her mind. “That is weird,” she murmured. Right as she said it, a strand of lights was flung off the edge of the roof, as if being thrown around my someone decorating above. Her heart froze as panic struck her. “I’ll go get the ladder,” she wheezed, stumbling towards the garage door.

“No need!” he whispered and when she turned back to give him an incredulous look, he was gone. She only had to spin her head around, looking for him, a couple of times before a distinct “psst!” noise directed her attention up to the roof. Lance was up there already, crouching next to a windowsill Pidge recognized to be her parent’s bedroom. Great, that was just what she needed was Lance waking her parents up. He pointed over the arch of the roof with a finger pressed to his lips, indicating that she should be quiet. Then he mouthed the distinct word that had been giving heartburn the whole week long. “Boogeyman!”

Lance watched as Pidge incredulously shook her head and ran into the garage to retrieve the ladder anyways. Leave it to her to need to see for herself what was going on up there, despite insisting she didn’t believe in any of it. Regardless, he lifted himself onto his feet, crawling along the shingles as quietly as he could, which was extremely difficult while dodging the light bulbs arranged all over the roof.

He could hear grumbling and rustling coming from the other side of the roof, the side facing the house that resided behind Pidge’s. It was definitely the Boogeyman, he pressed himself to the peak of the roof, peering over the top of it to assess the situation.

The Boogeyman had his back turned toward Lance, his tall figure bent over a box of lights as he struggled to untangle them. For some reason, the Boogeyman only seemed to be interested in white strings of lights and purple ones. Which seemed to match perfectly with the purple skin that Lance could just barely make out from what he saw of the Boogeyman’s hands. His jaw dropped as he got his first real, good look at his target and he decided he had to do something. He had no plan of action; no weapons to attack the Boogeyman nor any indication that Slav would ever WANT him to attack yet. But he couldn’t stand idly by. After all, this was more than just Pidge’s life and house. Keith lived here too. What if the Boogeyman went after Keith? Lance thought back to the little temper tantrum he’d thrown at Pidge earlier and swallowed. No, it was much better to attack now and ask questions later. Before it was too late.

He slowly pushed himself up, swinging a leg over the peak of the roof to climb over it. But when his foot met the solid surface, he felt an extra something beneath his boot give a loud “crunch!” Stupid idiot that he was, had gone and stepped directly on a light bulb.

The Boogeyman clearly had heard. He straightened his long spine and slowly turned to face Lance, who was met with a sight that shocked him so much it nearly sent him tumbling off the roof. In some places, the purple skin appeared to actually have tufts of purple fur. And as if the purple skin wasn’t enough, the Boogeyman had deep red circles underneath his pale eyes. His grey hair stuck in every direction and his teeth came to sharp points at the ends as he let out a rippling growl towards Lance, pressing his talon-like hands to the roof, on all fours like some kind of wild animal.

Lance finally found the words to describe what he was feeling and it wasn’t gracefully put. “What in sweet Barney-the-Purple-Werewolf hell?!”

The Boogeyman didn’t hesitate to fling the strand of lights in his hand towards Lance like some kind of makeshift whip. The wiring managed to knock him in the back of the knees, sending him tumbling backwards down the roof. After a few clumsy somersaults, he managed to reach out a hand and catch himself right before he reeled right off of the roof altogether. He clutched to the quickly peeling shingle with all his might, trying to grip for anything sturdier to hold onto. His feet were dangling off the edge of the roof, kicking at empty space below him.

“You tried to get the jump on me, didn’t you?” the Boogeyman prowled forwards towards Lance on his feet, almost like a normal human again. “But now one wrong step and you’re in trouble too.” His voice was hoarse, but not quite like the growl Lance had expected. If anything, he sounded more like he'd once had a normal-sounding voice and had just smoked a few too many cigarettes in his lifetime. 

A groan tore itself through Lance’s throat before he could stop it. “Jeez, we got a rhymer…”

“That’s rich coming from a connoisseur of puns,” The Boogeyman replied, clearly unamused at the insult. “I think soon you’ll find my kinds of play on words to be more fun.”

“Lance!?” Pidge’s voice called with worry.

That’s right! Pidge was still out here, this was his chance to prove himself to her! To prove he wasn’t lying. And he’d have to do it quick because he needed help, and fast. His grip was slipping. “Pidgeon! Pidge, can you see him!?” he thrashed his feet about wildly, trying to direct her attention to the purple man who was now turning his attention on to her. “The Boogeyman!”

“Katie,” the growl was so soft that Lance had barely heard it and certainly didn’t really register it in his struggle to stay put on the roof. 

“Pidge!” the shingle gave way beneath Lance’s hand and slid quickly from the roof, towards the ground below. He grabbed at the next thing his hand could reach, which was just another shingle. It wouldn’t hold him for long, just like the last one didn’t.

“I’m coming!” she was struggling to stand the ladder up, with it being much too large for her tiny body to maneuver without a fair amount of awkwardness. “Just hold on!”

The Boogeyman gave Lance a sickening grin and just continued on, as if he'd clearly deemed Pidge to be no threat. “Don’t you worry that I’m the one she can see. Soon enough, she’ll have deal with a Boogey.”  

“Can you see him!?” Lance demanded, pointedly trying to ignore the Boogeyman’s incessant rhyming. Priorities. Never let anyone say Lance didn’t have them. At this point, it just felt like the rhymes were just hollow taunts.

The Boogeyman ran a cold finger along the back of his hand then, so he had no choice but to look back up as the touch sent a terrifying shudder down his spine. It was like all of the heat had been sucked from his body at the point where their skin had briefly touched. The two locked eyes and held each other’s gaze, yellow on yellow. “You seem to be having a bit of trouble with your eyes upon my first glance. Perhaps soon you will be ready to join me, Lance?”

He stopped kicking his legs out for some kind of foothold at that, gazing at the man’s wickedly knowing grin. “No,” he gritted out between his teeth defiantly. The pause in his attention was enough for the next shingle to slip out from under him, sending him hurtling towards the ground—towards Pidge. Lance landed on the ground with a loud thud, but not before the shingle itself sailed at Pidge’s head, knocking her backwards.

The ladder she’d spent the last few minutes struggling with teetered unsteadily as she fell over onto it, swinging towards the house. A loud crashing sound permeated the silence of the nighttime as it smashed through a window. That window was the very one Pidge had worried about earlier—her parents bedroom. She held a hand up to her mouth in a gasp, pushing herself up onto her feet. “What the hell was that about, Lance!? I’m dead, now!” she spun to face where Lance had been on the ground a moment ago, but as per his usual modus operandi, he was gone.

The lights decorating the roof sprang to life with an electric ‘click!’ and Pidge had to shield her eyes against them, in the night sky, for a moment. Once her vision adjusted accordingly, she carefully peered over her arm to take it in. Indeed, the Boogeyman had only decorated the house in white and purple lights. But they were laid out in a veryy specific design. The purple lights clustered together in the center of the overlay, creating a large “V” shape on Pidge’s roof.

She barely had any time to process it before her parents came running out the front door in nothing but their pajamas. Oh, she was so royally screwed. They wildly looked from the ladder on the ground up to the roof. Her Dad’s eyes widened while her Papa raised a hand to cover his mouth in shock. “Pidge, what is this?!” Dad demanded, his eyes landing once again on the smashed in window.

Pidge opened her mouth a few times, unsure how to answer. There was no good explanation for this, nor any conceivable excuse she could make up. She was caught. Thoroughly and completely trapped. So instead Pidge accidentally did what she later reasoned any sixteen-year-old girl would do when her house’s window has been smashed in at 3:30 AM on a school night without explanation. She froze.

After all, she _could_ blame it on the invisible boy who was following her around. But why do that when she could, instead, just totally freeze and solidify any suspicion her parents may have had of her?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hope you enjoyed! :D


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lance builds a strange device from instructions inside of Slav's book and Pidge isn't so sure the science is totally sound. More strange behavior from the imaginary friend leaves Pidge hurt, and Lance panicking.

Pidge had stayed up the rest of the night with her dads as they tried to get answers about what she was doing outside with the ladder the same night that Christmas lights had mysteriously covered every inch of their roof. At one point, Papa stressed that the extra energy was going to kill their electric bill for the month, which only served to make her feel guilty about something she didn't even do. And Pidge had little explanation to give them. She admitted she’d been outside with the ladder, but insisted to them that she had nothing to do with the lights. Which was true, they’d just appeared there last night when Lance had woken her up with claims about the Boogeyman on her roof.

Not that she was even going to bother to try and explain Lance to them. It would only serve to make her look even more unstable than breaking down in tears at school and standing outside with a ladder and no explanation already did. Eventually she suggested that she’d had the ladder outside to get a better look at the lights herself, having been woken up by them shining through her window. After retelling the story multiple times, her parents either finally decided she’d convinced them or they just gave up from exhaustion. Pidge wagered it was the latter; she knew her own story made no dang sense.

But regardless, Shiro and Hunk had decided not to push it and she was eternally grateful for that. Pidge was many things, but creative enough to be able to make up stories on her feet was not one of them. That was more Matt’s specialty. In fact, her parents seemed so tired with the whole thing that they hadn’t even fought her when she’d asked to stay home from school that day. After all, they were all sleep deprived after staying up half the night. So she finally crawled back into her bed at eight o’clock in the morning, after having seen Keith onto his school bus and her parents had both left for work for the day.

She didn’t get to sleep for very long, though. A few hours later, she could hear noise from somewhere in the house. It sounded like it was coming from the basement, so she figured her Dad must have come back to work from home, as he sometimes preferred to do. It wasn’t until moments later when she heard the sound of a drill that she sprung to sit up, throwing the covers off of her shoulders. She listened intently, trying to figure out what she was hearing. The drilling noise stopped a few moments later, followed by the sound of hammering. It _was_ coming from the basement, after all. If it had been her Dad, he would have immediately retreated into his office to answer emails or something. So, it had to be someone else in the house and as Pidge shoved her glasses on, she had a sneaking suspicion she knew who.

She stumbled down the two flights of stairs towards the basement, still rubbing her eyes awake. When she finally got down there, a loud ringing had begun to blare. Her hands flew to cover her ears as she saw a tanned hand quickly smack down on the top of the alarm clock to silence it. “Wake-y wake-y, Pidgeon!” Lance beamed, tossing the small clock to her. “We’ve got work to do!”

“Work?” Pidge stepped off the staircase and into the basement, taking in the sight. Lance was standing by the work bench, in probably the only task-appropriate outfit she’d seen him in, yet. He was in dirty blue coveralls like a mechanic would wear, safety goggles strapped to the top of his head. The table before him was covered in old outdated electronics in varying states of dissection and Pidge immediately recognized them as the boxes of old household items her dads had stashed away down there. Behind Lance, propped against the wall on a counter top, was the book, with diagrams spilling out of it like some sort of Ikea instruction sheet. In the middle of it all was a tall device the she couldn’t identify. It looked like a tangle of nonsensical motherboards and scavenged parts glued together in a vaguely rectangular shaped heap. Wires ran up what appeared to be a weather vane sprouting out if the top, eventually connecting in a coil like something out of a science fiction movie. It had stolen backpack straps on it for easy mobility. Frankly, it resembled a proton pack on drugs. “What is this?!” she demanded as her jaw dropped.

Lance held his hands out to show the device off like he was a model on the Price is Right. “Do you like it?!” he beamed, clearly proud of his work. “It’s a mini teludav! At least, it will be if it works.”

Pidge blinked, taking a step closer to examine the thing with an adjustment to her glasses. The item didn’t look like much more than a hunk of junk electronics parts. Except for up near the top of one of the shoulder straps, where she saw a small rubber figure of a cow that she immediately recognized as being stolen from Keith’s room. She pointed at it with a quirk of her eyebrow. He just smiled in response. “Oh, that’s Kaltenecker! She’s my girlfriend!”

“Your girlfriend is a toy cow?”

“The pickings are slim when you’re imaginary,” he shrugged and turned back to the book, reading over the next steps in his instructions. He looked completely fine after his fall from the roof last night, which Pidge wasn’t sure if she was surprised about or not. Nothing about him really shocked her all that much anymore. “Been meaning to ask you something,” she heard him mumble, still hunched away from her. His voice sounded serious for once, a sound she didn’t think she’d heard outside of the one argument they’d had. “You sure you didn’t do anything to tick the Boogeyman off?”

“I think I’d remember if I did,” Pidge scoffed in response. Beside the point, you couldn’t offend someone who didn’t really exist. Her mind was too busy swimming with other questions to ask him. “Wait, so if you’re imaginary… and the fall from the roof didn’t hurt you at all… does that mean you can’t die?”

Lance stood up straight again, turning to face her with his eyebrows knit together in thought. “I don’t know,” he answered. “I’ve never asked.”

“Well how old are you?”

“Don’t know!” He had picked up a tool and gone back to fiddling with his invention.

“So do you not grow up?” she leaned in to get a closer look but lost interest when she saw all he was really doing was poking at it repeatedly with the tip of the screwdriver.

“No, our friends grow up,” he said in a voice like he was concentrating very hard on the poking. “Our kids. When they get old, then we just go find new friends! Ha, guess you could say that I’m timeless!” He picked up the alarm clock again and gave it a little shake before shoving it into an inner pocket of his coveralls. It looked like the clock had disappeared altogether.

Pidge rolled her eyes and turned to see if she could understand the formulas and instructions written in the book, but it seemed to be in a made-up language she couldn’t understand. The letters just looked like squiggles and odd shapes. “Then why didn’t you just go get a new friend after Keith stopped believing in you?”

“Because Keith still needs me, Pidge!” Lance slammed the screwdriver down onto the table, his demeanor taking a 180 degree turn, the same way it had the day they’d fought. If she had to take a guess, she would bet that if she could see his eyes from this angle, they’d be bright yellow like they had been that day.

Pidge didn’t know what to say to him, feeling a small pang of guilt. The logical part of her mind still couldn’t wrap her head around everything the past few days, but if it all was true, then Lance was hurt right now and it was her fault. She reached a hand up and gently placed it on his shoulder, not sure what else to say or do. After a moment, she decided to change the subject might be the best option for now. “So, what does the teludav do?” she asked.

Lance rubbed his nose with a short sniff and turned to the device, his smile returned. If his eyes had turned yellow at all, there was no sign of it now. “Oh this?” he sauntered over to his invention, picking up the screwdriver as he went. “It’s so easy a child could understand it! In fact,” he leaned in to Pidge and pitched his voice low like he was telling a secret, “if I told an adult, they wouldn’t understand it at all!”

“Try me,” Pidge pushed him onward. She was a science kid and she’d managed to skip two grades. She was pretty sure she’d be able to understand whatever it was that he was about to throw at her.

“Okay, so to get to the reality where the Boogeyman lives, we need to open what’s called a ‘wormhole,’ you follow?”

Pidge sighed. “Yes, I’m familiar with the theory.”

Lance grinned. “Thank god, because I had no idea what the heck Slav was talking about the first time he told me,” he pulled the safety goggles down over his eyes with a flourish of his fingertips. “So, how it works is this; First, you need some kind of really powerful energy source. I thought about stealing a phone battery for that, but then I realized phone batteries can’t even hold a charge! How would they be powerful enough? So instead I just used a couple of old 9 Volts I pulled from junk in that box.”

“You decided 9  Volts were more powerful than a phone battery?” she stopped him to ask in disbelief.

“Yeah!” he said with a smile. “Like I said, phone batteries can’t even hold a charge for a full day!”

“Kid logic…” Pidge breathed, quoting what Lance had said back when she’d asked him about his strange outfits.

“So that energy source gets sent up and concentrated through this thing called a ‘scaultrite lens’ and—“

She followed where his fingertip pointed to a small crystalline circle being held in place by unstable looking clothespins. In an instant, she recognized what it was. “A scaul-what?” she asked with a sigh.

“A scaultrite lens.”

“That’s a coaster from my living room, Lance.”

“Fine,” he huffed, clearly annoyed with her constant interruptions. “Then in that case, the energy will COAST through this lens, which will concentrate it. Have you ever seen what happens when you let sunlight go through a magnifying glass? I guess it’s gotta be kind of like that. But I’m not sure. I’m an imaginary friend, not a scientist! So after the lens concentrates the energy, it gets sent up through here,” he drew his finger up the weather vane and coils. “And gets shot out of there. And if I’ve done everything right, that concentrated energy will be enough to open the wormhole!”

“Jeez,” Pidge rubbed at her temples, feeling the headache coming on. “I don’t think this is going to work, Lance. First of all, science has not come nearly far enough to understand how to safely create wormholes. Second, you would need way more energy than what a couple of 9-volt batteries can provide. Third, you can’t realistically create a device powerful enough using junk from my basement. This is more likely to electrocute you than do any of the crazy stuff you just said.”

There was a long, uncomfortable pause between them before he finally replied. “Stick to science, Pidge,” Lance rolled his eyes. “Because clearly creative thinking is not your strong suit.” He turned to fiddle with the device again, looking almost hurt by her words.

“Excuse me?”

“You don’t think I understand that the teludav isn’t ‘realistic?’” he shook his head. “Pidge, I’m not even realistic. Comes with the territory of being ‘imaginary.’ I don’t know why this thing works because I’m not the one who thought it up. It was in the book and I followed the instructions. That’s all I know.”

“You seem pretty confident in an imagined doodle,” Pidge tilted her head to the side as she crossed her arms.

“Well do you have any better ideas on how to beat this thing?” She stayed silent at that question. Truth was, she wasn’t even sure she believed that the Boogeyman was real at all. Lance had said that he’d been on the roof the night before, and although she had heard some sort of a scuffle up there while she’d been in the garage retrieving the ladder, she hadn’t seen anything. And she had tried to look when Lance called out to her. But there was nothing there. Her silence became her answer and he proceeded anyways. “That’s what I thought. Now, I would go ahead and give you a demonstration, but uh… Then I’d open up a wormhole to the Boogey World right here in your basement and that’d just make things worse rather than better. We’ve got to figure out how we’re going to beat this thing first. Maybe you were on to something with that whole ‘electrocution’ thing…”

“You said the Boogey World was an alternate reality,” Pidge tried to wrap her head around that fact next. “What is it like a parallel universe or some sort of dark version of our world…?”

Lance snickered. “No, it’s not the Upside Down, Pidge. It’s just a reality where the Boogeyman lives. I dunno what it looks like though. Guess we’ll just have to find out when we go there.”

“Wait, we?” she asked, incredulously.

“Well yeah,” he answered with a smile. “I’m not going there alone, no way! Besides, you’re the one the Boogeyman is after.”

“You want me to go to an alternate reality with you?”

“What? It’s not like you haven’t been to one before!”

“I haven’t!” Pidge said with a solid laugh. But then a weird feeling formed in her stomach… Queasiness. Like she’d just told a lie. But that wasn’t possible, she hadn’t lied. Had she? "I think I'd remember if I'd ever visited an alternate reality." She wasn't sure if the last statement had been for his benefit or her own. 

“Hm, the lady doth protest too much,” Lance chanted at her in a sing-song tone of voice. He pushed the goggles back up onto his forehead. His face was serious now as he took both of her hands into his and looked her in the eye. The sudden intensity made her feel as though a rock had been dropped into her stomach. “Pidge, have you ever had a dream? Like, when you were sleeping and you dreamed a place so vividly that it’s almost like you went someplace else… someplace so real that it leaves you confused when you wake up? Like if you’d just stayed there forever it would have become real? Or maybe when you were there you knew in your heart that it WAS real and waking up was just… wrong.”

In her mind, she could remember that exact feeling. It was how she felt every time she dreamed of the green place. When she saw the metal lion, her armor… the spacial sky and the feeling of flying. But that was just a strong dream—something formed by her subconscious so her brain could filter through the things she saw every day. Everyone experienced it. That didn’t mean she’d gone to another reality. “I guess… I-I mean, yeah, but…” she stumbled over her words, her tongue tying itself in knots for a reason she couldn’t discern. The silence that fell over them then was almost tense. She didn’t know what to say to break it. On one hand, she wanted to change the subject, but on the other…

Lance broke from their locked gaze, down to their hands held together between them. “Okay, Pidge,” his voice was low. Serious. “I get it. It’s a really personal thing, I guess.”

When he turned to break away from her again, something sharp slid across the surface of the skin of her wrist. Pidge sucked in a winced breath. “Ow!! You scratched me!” she pressed a hand to the small cut, blood slipping between her two front fingers. Her jaw dropped. “Oh my god, what the hell, Lance?!”

His eyes widened and in less than a second later he had pulled a rag from his endless, magical pockets to press against her wrist. “I’m so, so sorry!” his voice was quick with his evident panic. “Let me help fix that—“

“Stop! Stop! I’ve got it!” she huffed and yanked the cloth from his hand. There was a slight tearing noise and the rag was ripped in two, half of it in Pidge’s hand and the other half…

Was stuck to Lance’s fingernails, which had somehow become long and talon-like. Pidge gasped at the sight, quickly taking a step back in her alarm. They looked like claws now; black in color and thick. He yanked his hands away, trying to hide them behind his back, but it was too late. They both knew she’d already seen them. “I-I… I used to bite them…” he muttered. “So they grow really quick now!”

“They’re black!”

“I was going for a look,” he was practically yelling it, faking some laughter. But he was clearly avoiding looking up at her face. “Rock star thing. G-guess it didn’t work! Duly noted!”

“Calm down!” Pidge pressed on. His quickly growing anxiety over the whole thing was worrying her more than anything else. It was like he had something to hide. In fact, she was more than positive that he was hiding something. But that wasn’t what she said to him. No, what came out of her mouth was much more tactful than that. “God, you’re acting weird!”

Okay, so maybe it wasn’t that tactful at all.

He turned to face away from her entirely, shoving his hands deep into his pockets so that she couldn’t get another good look in otherwise. Instead, she just went back to dabbing at the blood with the torn up rag. But not before she heard him grumble inwardly. “Yeah right, like you’d know…”

“Excuse me?”

“You ever met any other imaginary people, Pidge?!” he snapped, still refusing to look back at her. “For all you know I could be acting totally normal for my kind!”

She could feel herself getting mad, now. His words were either a really bad excuse for his behavior, or him being defensive about something. Either way, she didn’t have the patience to deal with it while she was bleeding all over her basement. “Whatever, Lance! I’m gonna go inside and bandage this up.”

Pidge turned on her heel and stomped her way back upstairs and went directly towards her bathroom for the first aid kit, leaving Lance alone in the basement again. He watched her go with burning eyes, suppressing the shudder that was rippling down his spine. He was pretty sure he could figure out by this point exactly why his eyes felt like they were being forcibly dried out. They had to be shifting color again, out of his control. Once he was sure he could hear her slamming the bathroom door behind her, he swallowed the lump in his throat and slowly pulled his hands out of his pocket again.

Only the one hand had somehow produced the long claws so far. The other, the nails were still darkening into a dull matte black color. But it was happening quickly. Too quickly. His jaw dropped and another shudder rolled through him. He didn’t know if it was out of fear or some weird sort of adrenaline.

His fingernails didn’t stay that way for long. Not even a few seconds later, it was happening again. A buzzing, electric feeling surged down the length of his already normally long fingers and pulsating at his cuticles. He sucked in a breath at the sensation, watching in horror as the black keratin crept out from under his nail beds, extending outward like a cat’s claws. They didn’t stop until they’d reached nearly a full two inches in length, matching his other hand perfectly.

Now he was pretty certain the shaking he was feeling in his body was fear. It wasn’t an emotion he was used to. Normally, it was his friends who were the ones getting scared. His kids. And he’d always known exactly how to help them through it. But now he wasn’t sure how to take his own advice. Being genuinely terrified was kind of a new experience. He didn’t like it. The eyes changing color was one thing… he could hide that until they shifted back to blue. But these nails? Fingernails can’t un-grow.

No, no, he had to cut them off. He needed to cut his nails right now.

Lance quickly turned around, looking for the first sharp thing he could find. There were wire cutters still on the work bench that he’d used to build the teludav. Guess he had to try it… with a shaky hand, he struggled to pick up the plier-like object around the claws. After struggling for a few seconds of trying to pick them up, then shaking so badly that he dropped them again, he finally had a firm enough grip on them.

One last gulp to swallow down the bile he could taste in the back of his throat and he slowly brought the clippers to the hard black surface of his nails…

Back inside the house, somewhere around ten minutes later Pidge had managed to clean the small wound, discovering to her great relief that it wasn’t that deep at all. Just a lot of blood for one scratch. She had managed to press some gauze to it as a bandage, miraculously sticking it down in place with medical tape. With use of only one hand for the task, she was impressed with herself that she’d managed to only tangle the tape twice.

When she’d returned the first aid kit to it’s proper place in the medicine cabinet, she decided maybe she’d been too harsh on Lance when she’d left. It had clearly been an accident, and he tried to help as soon as he'd realized what he'd done. He was just so frustrating all the time! It was their personalities. They just clashed. And he was definitely hiding something from her. First his eyes and now this. She made a face as she thought back to the claws that had suddenly sprung out. And he was lying about the black color; she would have noticed if he’d just casually had them painted the whole time. No, she’d been keeping a running mental log of his ridiculous outfits, if only for her own amusement. Not that Pidge considered wearing nail polish to be ridiculous. She just would have seen it before.

With a heaved sigh, Pidge shut the mirrored door of the medicine cabinet and immediately jumped at the sight of two figures looking back at her in the reflection instead of just her own. A yelp bubbled from her lips and she grabbed her chest, pretty sure her heart had actually skipped a beat. “Lance!” she yelled, turning to look at where he stood behind her.

Or, at least, where he SHOULD have been standing behind her. Except he wasn’t there. Slowly, Pidge turned back to the mirror, where Lance still beamed. “You know, I have some excellent facial mask recommendations if you’re looking to up your skincare regime,” he leaned in towards the glass as if he were examining her pores.  

“How are you doing that?!” Pidge demanded, electing to ignore the prying insult to her skin. She did another look behind her to make sure she hadn’t simply missed Lance standing there. But no, a second glance confirmed that he wasn’t there. Just inside the mirror somehow.

When she turned back to look at the reflection, he was having himself another little latin inspired dance, despite the total silence between them and the otherwise empty house.  Showing off, Pidge figured. And he was back in his regular clothing. “What are you doing in there?” her voice was punctuated, trying to control her already irked nerves.

Lance stopped dancing long enough to give her a cheeky grin. “Just pausing to reflect.”

Another pun. Yep, she was definitely starting to feel a headache come on. This was too much for her to handle right now, especially after everything that had just happened in the basement. Now he was just standing in her mirror acting like everything was totally normal. This wasn’t normal at all. “No… no, no, no… get out of my mirror, Lance! This is too far!”

He tossed his head back in a groan, his shoulders slumping with it. “You’re no fun,” he grumbled. It wasn’t a protest, though, as he came closer to the glass and pushed himself up onto the counter in the reflection. “Might wanna move,” he got himself into a crouching position. “This is gonna be a tight squeeze. Tiniest mirror in the galaxy, right here…”

Pidge barely had time to process the idea that he was apparently going to literally climb his way through the mirror before he was sticking a long leg out and actually doing it. It was like the glass didn’t even exist to him; he passed through it like air. As if the mirror had never been a mirror at all and was instead some sort of small window into another bathroom, that looked nearly identical to Pidge’s, except everything was reversed.

Lance’s shoulders and torso followed the first leg through the small mirror, reaching his hands out to brace himself on the wall at either side of him. His nails where still black, but now they looked to be a normal, human length. It was almost a relief if not for the matte black color serving as a reminder. He straightened out as he pulled his final leg through and then hopped of the counter with a triumphant little ‘tada!’

“I need a nap,” Pidge mumbled as she reached a hand out to feel the mirror. It was solid glass, cold and unforgiving underneath her skin. Maybe if she were lucky, this would all prove to be just another weird dream.

If only she were that lucky.

“So, I was thinking,” Lance grabbed at a nail file off of the counter top and absentmindedly went to work on his nails. He turned to face Pidge, lowering himself onto the edge of the bathtub before sliding his butt backwards down into it so he was sitting inside the tub itself, his legs dangling over the side.

“That sounds dangerous for you…”

He gave her a grin, seeming more amused by the quip than insulted. “Yeah, yeah. I was thinking. After last night, the Boogeyman definitely knows we’re after him. I did kind of blow my own cover, after all. But because of that, he may not come out from under your bed for a while. He might try and stay down there… play it safe. Who knows how long he’ll hide.”

“Isn’t that a good thing?” Pidge asked. “It’ll give you more time to figure out how to beat him. What’s the hurry?”

“What? No! No hurry,” Lance shook his head a little too quickly, still staring absently at his nail with the file. “I just thought it’d be better to get him taken care of sooner rather than later. You know, before something bad happens or he does something worse.”

“Something bad?”

“I mean… not that I think it will. I just wanna play it safe, too.” Lance was shaking one foot that stuck up out of the tub back and forth, restlessly. “I think I know a way to lure him out!”

Pidge wasn’t sure she wanted to hear another crazy scheme or more made up, fake science like he’d fed her earlier with the teludav. But she wasn’t going to shake him off soon so she just heaved a sigh and decided to ask. “What?”

“It’s in the book,” Lance pointed the nail file to the counter behind Pidge, revealing that the book had appeared behind her like magic. “There’s this recipe in there for some kind of food goo. Apparently, the Boogeyman loves it. If I can make it, I can draw him out. It’s gonna take me a little while to find the ingredients, though.” He was climbing back out of the tub now, shoving the nail file into his coat pocket and Pidge had the uncanny feeling that they’d never see it again.

She sighed, deciding quickly that she was definitely going to try and sneak a nap in while she could. “Well you figure that out, Lance. I’m going to try and get some homework done or maybe sleep or something.” She reached under her glasses to rub at her tired eyes. With a discerning look up and down to make sure he wasn’t sprouting any more inhuman characteristics, she headed out the door and towards her own bedroom. “Maybe you should try the imaginary food section!” she called back over her shoulder.

“Imagination puns are getting old, Pidge!” Lance said, despite his own giggling at the joke. “Get your own material!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey everyone! So, I know that this chapter took me a bit longer to upload than usual! Things got kind of crazy around and after Halloween! But I DO plan on finishing this and then going on to finish my bigger fic project that I've been working on for months! 
> 
> If you want, you can follow me on tumblr (my url is slightecho on there as well) and feel free to message me if you want! I don't mind! And if I don't answer, I probably don't realize I have a message so just feel free to kick me! 
> 
> Anyways, I hope you enjoyed!


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Two blissful days without Lance have Pidge thinking maybe she'd finally free! And just in time for her family's big dinner with Coran, the school's counselor. If they can just get through this dinner, maybe things will finally start going back to normal for Pidge. 
> 
> Oh, if only things ever worked out that way...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Listen... I know it's been over a year...
> 
> I have no excuse.
> 
> (But I got a new computer and lost a few chapters and also mental health and also moved across the country from where I was living okay? okay.)
> 
> Real talk, though, I had already written Chapter 8 and 9 of this fic when I'd posted 7 but I haven't written anymore in the over one year since then. So I do want to get these two chapters up because I do know there were some people who enjoyed this fic! I don't know if I'll finish it, and I think I might be starting a new Plance fic soon, but we'll see. Until then, I'm gonna give you the last two chapters that I DID have written before I stopped.

Almost two days had gone by since Pidge had last seen Lance. Two blissfully peaceful days with no new disasters striking the town and no blue-but-sometimes-yellow-eyed invisible boys who stole small objects from around her house, crawled through mirrors and made her think she was talking to herself. She almost dared to think that maybe she’d heard the last of the entire thing. If “the Boogeyman,” had he really ever existed at all, stopped wreaking havoc, then that would mean Lance wouldn’t have to come back either. Which meant Pidge was free!

If only the world ever worked out that way.

It was Saturday night now, the night Coran was coming to their house to have dinner, much to Pidge’s chagrin. Clearly her brothers were feeling the same. Matt had retreated to his own bedroom, probably to binge video games until he was forced to come out and be a human in front of their guest. Keith was having none of the nonsense that night, fighting their Dad tooth and nail against wearing the tie Shiro was trying to coax around his neck, yelling at the top of his lungs about it. Last time Pidge had updated herself on that situation, Keith had actually managed to rip the top button of his shirt off in a desperate attempt to get the collar off of his neck.

She guessed Shiro would probably give it another five minutes of trying to get him dressed properly before finally admitting defeat and letting the child wear his favorite beat up, red sweatshirt to dinner instead.

Even Pidge had found herself hiding from the inevitable, scrolling aimlessly down the webpage she had pulled up on her computer. For once in her life, she’d taken to trolling for memes as a preferred activity to whatever was going on in the house. She was laying on Matt’s bed, the two of them situated in the dark on their own individual computers, Pidge with her laptop propped in her lap and Matt sitting at his desk, gaming headset clamped firmly over his ears, one headphone askew so he could still hear Pidge as they lamented together over the whole affair.

“This is going to be like those stupid family group therapy sessions that the social workers used to make us all go to when Keith was sick, I bet,” Matt grumbled, clearly taking the frustration out on the red-outlined enemy player on his screen. She couldn’t say she didn’t disagree. “You couldn’t just fill a pool with rubber ducks like a normal senior, could you?” His smile betrayed the fact that he actually appeared pretty amused by what he believed to be Pidge's brilliant pranks.

“I’m not the one who did any of the stuff at school,” she stated in a bored tone of voice. At this point she wasn’t even fighting it anymore. All she could do was tell the truth and hope it was enough.

“So then why is the guidance counselor coming over to our house specifically to talk about you?” was Matt’s doubtful response. Boom! He clicked his controller furiously, managing to score a double-kill despite his distraction. He had too many hours logged on this particular game.

“Because now our dads are convinced I’m ‘troubled,’” she sighed.

“Well, are you?”

“No!” she snapped with a roll of her eyes that she knew he couldn’t see. “I don’t know what’s about to happen honestly. Maybe if we can just act normal enough for one dinner, Coran will see that we’re fine and convince Dad and Pops to chill.”

“Have you met Pops?” Matt snorted. “Only way you’ll ever get him to chill is by actually sticking him in a freezer.” Pidge matched his snort, but her retort was cut off by the sound of the doorbell ringing from downstairs. Her older brother groaned loudly, cancelling his search for a new game and yanking his headset off. Pidge closed her laptop and the two siblings met each other’s unenthused eyes. After a long beat, in which they could hear their Dad opening the dor and welcoming Coran into their home, Matt cast her a wry grin. “I bet you a week of trash duty that Keith spills juice on the guidance counselor before we make it to dessert.”

Pidge rolled her eyes and sat up. “Why would I take a bet you’re guaranteed to win?”

“Fine,” Matt stood up and stretched, the joints in his shoulders and hips popping after being seated in his desk chair for so long. “Two weeks and Keith has to spill the juice before we finish soup.”

“What if he spills the soup instead?” Pidge considered the offer. Keith hated most soups, so if anything was going to be spilled it was probably going to be that, while he pushed it around with his spoon, pretending to eat it. If soup counted, there was no way she was taking the bet.

“Has to be the juice,” Matt replied. “Juice gets spilt, I win and you take out the trash for two weeks. If anything besides juice gets spilt or, miracle of miracles, we make it through a dinner without any spills, then you win and I take out the trash.”

She playfully stroked at her chin, as if deep in thought over the terms he was proposing. Her older brother had his hand held out to shake on it, expectantly. “Hmm…” she dragged it out as long as she could. “Deal!”

And with that, the wager had begun! Just in time, too, as they could hear the sound of their Papa’s voice calling to them from downstairs, telling them to join. By the time Pidge and Matt had made it down the stairs, Keith had already ripped off the nice shirt Shiro had managed to convince him to wear and was sitting on the couch with his arms crossed, wearing his oversized sweater and a surly pout. This dinner was certainly going to be interesting enough.

“Ah, there you are!” Coran smiled cheerfully from near the doorway. “I hope you’ve been feeling better since our little meeting the other day.” His smile was as kind as ever, but knowing why he was here made Pidge disinclined to return the grin. She did anyways, knowing she would have to play along with this whole thing.

Ten minutes later they were all seated to dinner, her parents animatedly making small talk with Coran and the kids all doing their best to stay out of the conversation. As Pidge had predicted, Keith spent the entirety of their soup pushing the veggies around with his spoon, only bothering to eat the dried oyster crackers off the side of his plate. And after five minutes of pressing at the side of the bowl with his spoon, tilting it back and forth, the soup did, indeed, tip over with a loud clanking of his dishes sliding about when he tried to catch it. It wasn’t a total flood of a spill. But enough to get all over his sleeve and the get the people next to him. Pidge made sure to shoot Matt a triumphant grin, knowing that as soon as they’d cleaned up the mess, their Papa would return from the kitchen with a lid for Keith’s cup, which made the child very unhappy.

Pidge won the bet. Easy.

After the commotion that that had caused, the main course of dinner was served up and Coran started thanking them all profusely for letting him join them for dinner, going on and on about how this gave him such an insight into their home life. How it really had helped him to re-familiarize himself with who both Pidge and Matt were, both as students and as people. He was laying it on a little thick, frankly. The whole works. It was around this time that Pidge heard the telltale clanging of pots and pans coming from the kitchen. She glanced around, thinking maybe it had just been Papa bringing out more food. But, no, Pops was sitting at the table. Right next to Dad. Everyone was accounted for at the dinner table.

“I wish to apologize on behalf of that little meeting we had, Shiro,” Coran twisted at his mustache. “It was certainly never my intention, at least, to offend or suggest that Pidge was anything less than happy with her home situation. I remember when she first came to Garrison High and we had to meet once every other week. It’s clear to me that she’s much more well-adjusted now, after skipping two grades, than she ever was back then.”

“Well, I think we can all agree with that,” Shiro smiled, taking a sip of his own water. “Whoever’s behind all those things? Couldn’t possibly be our Pidge. She’s way too mature for all that.”

The clanging noise from inside the kitchen was getting louder now. But there was another sound that joined it. A familiar, off-key singing voice that only seemed to know songs in Spanish. Oh no. Not here. Not now.

Coran was just agreeing with her Dad when Pidge felt the immediate urge to put a stop to whatever Lance had to be doing in her kitchen. He might have been imaginary and a pain in the neck, but surely even he could understand that now was just not the right time.

“Can I be excused for a minute?” Pidge interrupted the conversation, having lost track of it completely.

Shiro and Hunk glanced at each other, trying to read what the other was thinking about it before answering. “Pidge, can it wait?”

“No, I’m so sorry,” she shook her head.

“Make it quick, sweetie,” Papa nodded, effectively dismissing her for the time being.

She shot up, leaving her already-folded napkin on the table beside her plate before dashing off to the kitchen, the sound of Keith complaining loudly that he wanted to leave the dinner table, too, following after her.

When she finally made it into the kitchen, she felt the steam and smoke before she even entered. And boy, was the smell that accompanied it even worse than expected. She reached a hand up to press against her nose, her face contorting into what had to be a ridiculously pained expression. “Oh my god! Lance!” she waved a hand around, trying to waft the smoke away. Guess fire alarms weren’t affected by imaginary people. “What are you doing?!”

“Pidge!” he stopped his singing long enough to loudly greet her. “I’m cooking up some of this Boogeyman food goo!” He danced in place while he opened a large pot to shake in what looked to be some rainbow sprinkles.

“That’s not food, it smells like sludge made of rotten jalapenos!” she choked out, trying to quell the gag reflex that was starting in the back of her throat. She leaned over to see if she could stand to get close enough to get a good look. Goo was truly the best way to describe the substance in the cauldron of a pot. It looked like the slime Pidge had made once with Keith after he’d seen a video about it on YouTube.

“Hey, I just followed the recipe,” Lance shrugged. He wiped his goo-covered hands off on the chef’s coat he wore and Pidge noted that his fingernails were still black, like they had been two days before. In the corner of the front of his chef’s coat, where a nametag would sit, embroidered on his lapel, the coat was instead embroidered with a logo that read “Imaginary Chef.” Like he was part of some show on the food network. He started listing the ingredients off on his fingers aloud for Pidge to hear. “Let’s see... So, we’ve got bacon grease, a lot of salt, some moldy cheese from the back of your fridge, freezer burnt ice cream, just about every type of pepper you could imagine, and finally it’s all topped off with some rainbow sprinkles. A perfect sundae to catch your Boogey. And that’s just the ingredients made of actual food.”

Pidge grimaced, not even wanting to figure out how he’d managed to take those ingredients and liquify them enough to achieve this decayed looking sludge. She repressed another gag. “There’s non-food items in this?” she asked, horrified.

Lance beamed. “Oh yeah! There’s some bugs for protein in there—I won’t tell you which ones, you don’t want to know. A dirty, sweaty old sock I got from your dads’ bedroom. Oh and uh…” He tossed her a Ziploc baggie filled with rusty old screws and nails. “Your daily dose of iron and magnesium. Also some leftovers from your school’s cafeteria. Take it from me, Pidgeon, do not eat the pizza they serve.” He gave a shudder at the thought. Of all the gross things he’d put in this vat of grossness and he was most creeped out by high school cafeteria pizza?

“That’s disgusting,” she choked out at him, grabbing a dish towel to hold it over her face and try to filter out some of the smell.

“I know, right? I hate leftovers!” Lance grimaced, grabbing at the large wooden spoon he had sticking out of the pot and painstakingly trying to stir its contents. The sludge was clearly almost too thick for him to be able to stir it up anymore. “Oh, by the way, I had to use your Pop’s giant standing blender over there earlier today because the peppers and cheese had to marinate in the sweat or something, I guess.”

Another dry heave. “That’s fine, just tell me you cleaned it off like twenty times after it touched an old sock!”

“What’s that?” he asked, raising on eyebrow.

That response worried Pidge. Her Papa had used that blender earlier to make dessert for this dinner. “Lance,” she started cautiously, gripping a hand on either of his shoulders. “Please tell me that you cleaned the mixer out after you put a dirty gym sock in it.”

“Uhh…” he stared at her with wide, blank eyes.

“Lance, no!” she covered her face again. Her parents were about to serve her guidance counselor a cheesecake with actual moldy cheese and peppers and… sweat. She had to stop them, she thought as she tried to turn to run from the kitchen, but Lance grabbed her forearm and pulled her back, his mind already onto the next subject.

“So, here’s what I’m thinking! I’ve got a plan! This food goo is irresistible to the Boogeyman, according to Slav,” he lidded the pot again, still not letting Pidge go despite her vocal protests and her trying to tug her arm away from him. “But you know how more and more kids are gluten intolerant than ever now? The Boogeyman is, too!” He bounced on his toes like a little kid who’d had too much sugar. “All we’ve gotta do is sneak a couple of those oyster cracker things your little brother loves so much into the food goo. Then, it’s gonna get him all stopped up and feeling bad! He should be pretty easy for us to attack from there! You were on to something with the electrocution thing, so I made some changes to the teludav, too.”

“Lance,” Pidge finally yanked her arm away. “It’s great and all that you’ve found a solution to a problem that isn’t real! TRULY! But thanks to you, my Pop’s about to serve the worst dessert of his life to my guidance counselor! I don’t have time for this!”

“Pidge?” she heard her Dad’s voice call from outside the kitchen. “Pidge?” His voice was getting closer.

“My Dad’s coming to check on me,” she muttered in a panic, wildly looking around at the mess that Lance had made of the kitchen. She turned around a few times, trying to formulate a plan to quickly hide the mess, but there was no solution for this. All she could do was secure the lid on the pot so that no one could see its disturbing contents. Somewhere in her own commotion and confusion, Lance had up and disappeared the way he always did.

A moment later, Shiro had entered the room and immediately covered his own nose, his face contorting up the same way Pidge’s had. “What are you doing?!” he hissed in a pinched sounding voice. It was clear he was trying his best not to breath around the words.

“Uhhh,” Pidge scrambled for an answer, grabbing The Theory of Boogey and shoving it in the cookbook drawer, praying that her Dad would assume it had been one of Papa’s cookbooks she was putting away. “Just trying out… a, uh… a recipe I saw online!”

“Since when do you care about cooking?” her Dad came closer, taking in the state of the countertops in front of his daughter. “And why did you choose _now_ to do this?”

“I was, uh, thinking about taking a Home Economics course next half of the school year,” she feigned innocence, trying to hide the more damning bowls of ingredients from his view. “But you know what, Dad? You’re right. Clearly cooking isn’t my strong suit.” She pushed past him to grab the oven mitts off of their hook on the wall. “I should just throw this out.”

Placing a glove on each hand, she made to lift the pot up and move it before her Dad could snoop and try to get a closer look. But it didn’t budge.

Her eyes widened slightly, feeling a small panic creep up her neck. The pot weighed much more than she expected. Sure, she’d thought that it’d be heavy. But this felt like she was trying to lift a whole person! She tried again for good measure, bracing herself for the sheer weight of it. The pot barely moved, her own tiny arms proving to be ineffectual against it. What the heck was with this food goo? It seemed to defy the laws of physics.

“Pidge, the game is up, okay?” her Dad huffed finally, ushering her away from the pot. “I don’t know what’s gotten into you, but I think it’s about time that you start telling the truth.”

“Now?” she glanced hesitantly over towards the dining room, worried maybe the others would start to worry where they were and come looking.

“Yes. Now.”

Pidge slowly pulled the oven mitts off, bracing herself for A Talk. But no sooner had Shiro opened his mouth than Matt had ran into the kitchen for him, looking pale and more than a little frazzled. The noise of him scrambling into the room had shocked both her and her Dad. “Uh, Dad, you… you might wanna get back out here?! I’m pretty sure Coran just found an actual ghost pepper in Pop’s cheesecake and Pop’s kind of freaking out a little!” He turned to go, but then called back over her shoulder. “And bring some milk! His mouth is on fire!”

Shiro cursed underneath his breath and turned to the cupboard that held their glasses, grabbing one. “Great,” he said curtly and he pulled the milk from the fridge. “What else can go wrong tonight?” Once he was done pouring the milk and screwing the lid back onto the jug he stopped and raised an eyebrow at Pidge. “How did a pepper like that even get into the cheesecake…?”

The two stared at each other for a minute in silence, Pidge begging the fates that her Dad didn’t connect her fake cooking project with this. But Shiro’s eyes drifted over the dishes splayed out over the countertop and eventually landed on a bowl containing sliced up pieces of various different pepper. “Please tell me this wasn’t you,” he breathed, sounding stunned. When she couldn’t come up with an answer, her silence told him all he needed to hear and he shook his head. “This dinner’s over for you, Pidge. We’ll discuss this later.”

And with that, her Dad exited the kitchen to take care of the emergency that had managed to ruin their evening. Pidge felt her heart sink as he walked away from her. Now even her own Dad, who had spent the whole week up until this point defending her, thought she was responsible for everything, too. She felt her eyes well up, her breath getting quicker with little hitching sobs.

“Pidge!” she was interrupted by a voice coming from inside the goo pot. Yes, that’s right. _Inside_ the pot. After everything that had just happened, this was really the last straw. More than angry or confused, she just felt tired and she shuffled forward and defeatedly lifted the lid off of the pot.

She heaved a sigh. “How… Lance, how did you get in there?”

And, indeed, the tall boy somehow was inside of it, already reaching his hands up to grab at either side of the edges of the pot and lift himself out. “Sorry,” he gritted out as his head popped up to meet her. “I got hungry!”

This wasn’t possible, Pidge told herself. There was no way that anyone could fit inside of there. He had to be pulling some kind of a trick. She shook her head a few times and ripped open the oven door, thinking she’d see his bottom half down there. Like he’d been using some kind of trap door to create the illusion that he was crawling out of the pot.

But the inside of the oven was empty and Lance was only halfway out of the pot, wriggling his hips back and forth to try and shimmy his lower half loose from the metal. “I swear, my stress weight goes right to my hips,” he said through gritted teeth as he finally wiggled loose. His white coat drenched a murky green color from the food goo as he lifted a leg up out of the pot and swung it over the side. “Gimme a hand, will ya?” he held his goo-covered hand out for Pidge. She stared at him incredulously, pinned in place by her own shock. “Uh, hello? Help me out, here!”

She blinked and shook her head, resolving herself to taking the slime soaked hand and helping him to keep his balance as he finally hoisted his last leg free and hopping down into the floor. With a flourish, he yanked the wooden spoon from inside the pot and started licking at it like he was lapping up leftover cake batter. Pidge made a face and held a hand out to try and stop him, but it was too late. “Lance, don’t eat that!”

“What?” he asked innocently, shrugging his shoulders. “I don’t think it’s that bad. But I was always kind of a chilihead, so…”

“No,” Pidge shook her head, feeling sick to her stomach at the sight of him eating that, knowing what was in it. “That’s disgusting!”

“Oh, come on,” he rolled his eyes, taking another hearty bite of the rotten substance. It made another wave of nausea settle into Pidge’s throat and she shook her head again, trying to fathom how he could possibly enjoy it.

“God you’re acting fishy,” she huffed. “First the eyes, and then the fingernails! Now you’re actually standing here in my kitchen eating poisonous slime you made to lure out the Boogeyman. Lance, what is wrong with you?!”

“Look Pidge,” his temper flared almost on cue, and he turned on his heel to face her. “Just get over it, okay?! I’m not like you, I’m an imaginary friend. I’m allowed to be a little weird.” From his throat came a strange sound. At first, she thought maybe he was wheezing, but then she realized it was pitched way too low for that.

“A-are… are you growling at me?!” she paused as he blinked in shock, a talon-like hand reaching up to touch his own throat. “Lance, your eyes are yellow again,” she sighed with a shake of her head. “What is going on with you?!”

“Listen, nothing is going on with me, okay Pidge!?” he barked out, pointing the head of the spoon to her chest to keep her from getting any closer to him. “Don’t start with me!! I’m fine, okay?!”

“I’m just trying to—“

“Just trying to stick your nose in my business, aren’t you?! Trying to figure out if something's wrong with me so you can act like you know it all again, just like you did when Keith was sick, right Pidge?!” his voice was getting louder, and the growling had started once again. “Don’t play games with me! Don’t even try!”

Before Pidge could get another word out, he turned on his heel and made quickly for the door, throwing the spoon into the sink with such force that she was sure she heard it breaking whatever glass must have been sitting there. She hesitated, not sure if she wanted to chase after him or if that’d even be a good idea given his current state. “Lance, please…” she breathed, hearing the thickness in her own voice. But he was already gone.  

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay hopefully I'll get chapter 9 up soon! ahahaha i'msorrypleaseforgiveme... ;;;


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After the dinner between Pidge's family and the guidance counselor turns into a disaster, Pidge learns the truth about what's happening to Lance. But it might be too late, as the Boogeyman attacks!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So this is the last of what I had written for this fic before I'd stopped updating it over a year ago. I think I might be able to finish it now, though! It just might take me a minute or two so I can write the end out. 
> 
> Hope you all enjoy chapter! And have a happy new year!!

After about half an hour of anxiously trying to clean up the mess Lance had left, Pidge had unceremoniously dumped the remainder of the food goo down the garbage disposal. She didn’t care anymore if Lance had plans for it or if this meant he’d have to make more. In fact, she didn’t really care about Lance at all right now. Not after the way he’d blown up on her. When she had cleaned the kitchen to the best of her ability, given her current emotional state, she’d retrieved The Theory of Boogey from the cookbook drawer she’d shoved it into and decided she wanted nothing more than to hide herself away in her room for the rest of the weekend. 

On her way upstairs, Pidge passed Keith on his way to the kitchen to steal some cookies away, and he made sure to inform her that after Coran had eaten the ghost pepper, he and Matt had finally been excused so that their dads could take care of the situation and do any potential damage control. She just told him to be careful not to get caught taking the cookies and continued towards her room. 

She came to a full stop when she passed by Keith’s open bedroom door. Out of her peripheral, she’d seen something she wish she hadn’t. And she hesitated in a way that made her wish she didn’t care so much. With a sigh, she turned into her younger brother’s room towards the young man in a cargo coat who was crouched next to Keith’s bed. This time, he was definitely making a wheezing noise, as if he was struggling to breathe properly. He didn’t seem to notice as she came closer towards him, his back fully turned to her. “Lance,” she said as softly as she could. Part of her was scared that if she startled him when he was like this, he’d react the same way he had in the kitchen, or in her bedroom that day he’d first started showing signs. 

That was it, wasn’t it? The yellow eyes, the long claws… Heck, probably even his sensitivity to the light days earlier in the library. They had all been signs… symptoms. “Lance,” she said again, finding the strength in her voice this time. “Are you… you’re turning, aren’t you?” 

He shook his head ‘no,’ but it was obvious he was just trying to keep some semblance of denial. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Pidge,” he croaked, sounding as if he’d been crying. 

She inched closer, cautiously. Like she was approaching a frightened animal. “Where do Boogeymen come from, Lance? Everything comes from somewhere… You came from a kid’s imagination. Keith’s imagination. It all makes sense now, the space shirts, the red hoodie you had on when I first saw you. Those are all clothes Keith has. And the cargo pilot thing…” She looked over to her younger brother’s small desk, which was covered in drawings he’d done of a story Pidge had told him long ago when he was in the hospital. A story of friends who sailed the stars together in their lion-shaped spaceships, fighting evil and saving the day. And it was those same kinds of drawings that Pidge had pinned up in her locker at school, from the same story Pidge had been dreaming of every night. She remembered that green lion now. “Keith wants to be a pilot when he grows up… But.... What about the bad imaginary thoughts? A kid makes up an imaginary friend to deal with the bad things, like sickness, or being alone. I figured that out. But where does a Boogeyman come from?” She was kneeling down on the floor by the bedpost now, still staying a safe couple of feet from him. The only answer he gave was a groan like he was in pain. 

But Pidge didn’t need his response to know where she could receive and answer. The answer was held in her arms right now. Of course, at the end of all things it came down to Pidge and her research. “It’s in the book, isn’t it?” Lance didn’t answer.

Chewing on her lower lip, she flipped open the book for herself for the first time since they’d found it. Just beyond the dedication page and a table of contents, she came to a preface. A simple couplet that she read aloud. “It’s here…”

_ ‘When a child too young no longer believes in their friend _

_ The sickness will overtake them and bring them to the Boogeymen.’ _

She could hear Lance whimpering from the pain and she sniffled with a nod. “You’re turning into one, aren’t you? Because I made Keith stop believing in you…” 

“Just go away, Pidge,” he answered in a cracked voice. “You can’t help me.”f

“Lance, I’m the one that did this to you!” she refused to take that for an answer, feeling the emotion overcome her. This emotion was different than her anxiety and frustration bubbling over the entire week, though. This was sadness; the kind she hadn’t felt since she thought that she might lose her little brother. Her voice cracked when she spoke again. “Don’t say I can’t help you now, okay?”

“Pidge?” a small voice came from the door. Her head snapped to attention and she turned to face it’s source. It was Keith, a small victorious stack of cookies clutched in his hand. “Who are you talking to?” 

“Keith,” she sniffed, trying to wipe the tears off her face before he could see them. Now wasn’t the time. Because Keith couldn’t see Lance either, and that was all Pidge’s fault. “Just… can you come back later?”

“It’s my room,” he grumbled with a roll of his eyes. God, he was so stubborn.

“Please?” she pleaded. 

He gave a childish huff and turned, exiting. But before he was out of earshot, he called back to her over his shoulder. “Fine! But I’m going to your room and playing on your computer!” 

She sighed, and momentarily reconciled the fact that he hadn’t asked for her password. Which meant he already knew it, somehow. And when she turned back to face Lance, he was facing her direction finally, all of his symptoms still lit up in his eyes and trailed along his fingernails, with the new addition of his two canine teeth having extended into sharp points. Fangs. He was watching Keith leave with tired eyes. Pidge didn’t know a lot about imaginary friends, but she knew that they were never supposed to look sad. 

And Lance looked very sad. 

He sniffed and reached into his pocket, like he’d done so many times before. “Could you, um… could you do me a favor?” he mumbled. Pidge half-heartedly hoped that maybe he’d pull out a funny item for the purpose of telling a joke like he’d done so many times before. But instead he just pulled out a red and grey plastic toy. 

It was a robotic lion. A small, red version of the lion from the stories, and that Pidge had seen in her dreams. 

She held her hand out to take it as Lance handed it over. “Could you give that to Keith?” he breathed. “I know he’s been looking for it for a long time, but um.. I-I’ve… I’ve kind of had it for a while now. Just didn’t want to let it go...” 

Pidge’s heart broke as she looked up to meet his eyes with her own. “You’re not saying goodbye, Lance.” 

“What?” he faked a laugh, rubbing at his nose. “Me? No, never!” 

“Let me talk to him. Maybe if I tell him about you… Tell him about our adventures this week… Maybe I can get him to believe in you again.” 

Lance squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head. “It’s too late for that, Pidge.” 

“I have to try—“

“Enough!!” he barked, slamming a hand down on the floor. The growling sound had erupted from deep inside his chest again and he started leaning in towards Pidge, subconsciously. But he wasn’t looming over at her, like he had before. No, this time he was sniffing at the air like a bloodhound. “Do you smell something, Pidge?” his voice came out in a low growl. 

Before she had a chance to answer, he’d pushed her aside, pressing his face to the floor and crawling along all fours, searching for the source of whatever his nose had seemed to catch a whiff of. It didn’t take him long to find it, as he darted forwards toward the open door, licking at the wooden flooring there. “Lance, stop! What are you doing?!” she managed to yell in alarm at him, scrambling to her feet. 

“Food goo,” he growled, looking up at her with a sickening grin, starting to crawl his away back towards her. She stumbled backwards, climbing over the footboard of Keith’s bed to try and put a barrier between herself and Lance. “It got all over the kitchen downstairs… and you must have stepped in it!” 

“Lance, stop it! Stop!” her heart was pounding in her check as he reached a hand over and grabbed at her ankles. “Stop it! I didn’t step in that sludge!” Before she could stop herself, she felt her hand come swinging down across his face with a righteous ‘SLAP!’ 

The two of them froze in shock, Pidge every bit as surprised that she’d slapped him as he seemed to be. A hand flew to her mouth, which was hanging open in a startled little ‘o’ shape. When they finally locked eyes again, the growling had stopped and Lance’s voice had returned to normal. “If you didn’t step in it,” he started with an eyebrow raised, “then how did it get up here?” 

As if answering them, a loud scream of fear came echoing down the hall from Pidge’s own bedroom. “It’s Keith!” she gasped, remembering the cookies in his small little hand. “When I came upstairs, I saw Keith heading to the kitchen!” With that, she and Lance were up and tearing down the hallway in a flash. 

But by the time they got there, there was no sign of the boy. “Keith?” Pidge called, searching frantically, ripping her covers up and searching around for any sign of him. She whipped her closet open, pulled the chair away from her desk, even threw the curtains back. All to no avail. He wasn’t there, and no answer came. Pidge’s laptop lay open and forgotten on the floor, the browser open to some kids’ video game that he’d been clicking away at. 

And next to it were two forgotten cookies, stolen away from the kitchen by a little boy whose dads had been too busy fussing over a totally unnecessary guest. She picked up one of the cookies, shaking her head in disbelief. “No,” Pidge muttered to Lance, still stubbornly unwilling to admit what she suspected was happening. “No, something on the computer must’ve scared him and he went downstairs.” 

As she turned to quickly leave her room and test that theory, Lance grabbed the cookie from her hand and gave it a long sniff before licking it. Not a second later he started coughing and gagging. “Oh, that’s nasty!” 

“What?” Pidge asked. Had Lance’s tastes changes so much that a cookie tasted gross and food goo tasted great? 

“The Boogeyman licked this!” he made a face and shuddered. “He must’ve gotten goo on it—you know how kids get sticky stuff all over everything—and the Boogeyman straight up LICKED it! Eugh!” 

“No,” Pidge shook her head, trying to process what Lance was saying. “No, you said the Boogeyman was after me, why would he take Keith?” 

“Well Keith is your little brother,” he thought out loud. Then he grinned with a sly wink, pointing to the chocolate chip cookie in his hand. “Maybe the Boogeyman figured that Keith was just a  _ chip _ off the ol’ block.” 

“That’s not funny, Lance!” Pidge huffed, smacking the ruined snack out of his hand, letting it fall to the floor. “If the Boogeyman has Keith, then why isn’t Keith under the bed?! I looked!” 

“I told you, Pidge! The Boogeyman lives in an alternate reality! You can’t see it just by looking down there.” Lance rubbed at his eyes with the bottoms of his palms, trying desperately to get them to shift back to normal. He just needed to buy them a little more time. “I’m getting the teludav! I’m going in after them.”

He turned, running out of the room on a mission. “Lance, no!” Pidge sighed, trying to chase after him. But when she left her room and looked on the stairwell for him, he was already long gone. She huffed a sigh and turned back inward toward her room. 

Except Lance was already back, his outfit changed to a white and blue set of armor that looked strangely familiar to Pidge. Like she’d seen something similar to it before. But there was time to figure out where later, as Lance had the teludav device aimed directly under her bed. When he’d said he’d made some adjustments to it, he hadn’t been lying. A pair of jumper cables was coiled up, attached to its side, and connected to the metal part of the weather vane. Pidge figured this was how the imaginary genius planned to shock the Boogeyman to death. Speaking of which… “Lance, you said you were going to weaken it with gluten. How the heck are you going to do that now? The food is gone, I dumped it! And now he’s already been drawn out and gone away again!” 

He grumbled as he pressed a couple of buttons at the side of the teludav, a few LED lights lighting up. “I’m just going to have to improvise, Pidge! And hope that shock therapy a la Boogey is enough.” 

“No!” Panic gripped her. “No, no, no! Lance, you can’t do this! You’re just gonna wind up getting us hurt with this… this teludav thing, trying to get to a place that doesn’t exist!” 

“You believe in the Boogeyman, don’t you?” he looked up at her expectantly. “You did a few minutes ago in Keith’s room when you started questioning me! If you believe in me becoming a--”

But Pidge was quick to interrupt his train of thought. “Why should I believe in him? I haven’t seen him! Believing in you is completely different; I can see you!” 

Lance shook his head, rubbing at his eyes again. She was so in denial that he was about to build her a boat to sail her down that river. “Wait, didn’t you see him on the roof that night?” 

“No, all I saw was you and a whole lot of Christmas lights.” She found herself sliding on a pair of shoes from inside her closet, anyways. “How do you expect me to believe in something I’ve never seen?” 

“You believe in gravity, don’t you?” 

“That’s different, Lance! That’s science!” He gave her a tired look and Pidge understood why. She knew at this point that she was just making excuses to what her own logic couldn’t explain. The longer she fought him on this, the more time they wasted bickering when they needed to be rescuing Keith. She’d seen enough at this point that even if she didn’t believe in the Boogeyman…

She believed in Lance and what he was telling her. And that was enough. 

The teludav made a whirring noise, as a few more lights sprung to life and an electronic mooing noise sounded. Lance grinned and pointed to the small rubber cow. “That’s my girl! Always putting the competition out to pasture!” 

As he started peeling the bedding away, clearing a path for the teludav, he suddenly jerked away, sucking a breath in and grimacing in pain again. “No, no, no!” he gritted his teeth, feeling his knees buckling from underneath him as he crumpled to the floor. “A little more time, I just need a little more time…!” His normally sun-bronzed skin was starting to turn ashy and pale, a painful shudder ripping through his body. He looked… almost purple. 

But just like that, Pidge was next to him, helping him back up so he could start flipping switches on the teludav. “I’m going with you,” Pidge stated. He was too sick now, he couldn’t do this alone. 

“No!” Lance barked, then winced at his own volume. He kept yelling at her, why was he always yelling at her? He wasn’t like this. “This isn’t something you can help me with, Pidge.”

“Stop saying I can’t help you!” she snapped back at him. “I’m the reason all of this is happening! You said it yourself, I must have done something to offend the Boogeyman! I’m the reason Keith doesn’t believe in you anymore. I need to do something to fix this! When Keith was sick, I was too young and I couldn’t do anything to help. Do you have any idea how it feels to be helpless like that again?!” 

“What a big help you were!! You told him to stop believing in things he loved!” Lance was turning all of his pain towards her now. “Not just me Pidge, but all those spooky monster things he loves so much?! Bigfoot? The Mothman?! Of course they scared him, Pidge, he’s a child! But that doesn’t mean he didn’t love them all the same! That’s just how Keith is built!!” 

“Stop yelling at me, I’ve heard this all before, I get it!” she pressed her fists to her temples, trying to rub away the tension that was forming in her head. “God, why are you being like this, Lance?!” 

“What do you expect, Pidge?!” he asked, his own voice a growl again. “I’m turning!”  Another shudder tore through his body, silencing him, and he bit down on his own knuckle to try and keep the pain in control. Once the wave passed, he took a deep breath to try and calm himself before looking up and her again. No, she couldn’t come with him. He didn’t want anyone else getting hurt. Pidge couldn’t get lost in the Boogey world, too, and this family was hurting enough as it was. No, Pidge had to stay here, where it was safe. “And what happens if I go full monster down there, huh? I’m not putting you in that danger.” 

Pidge blinked and shook her head. After everything she’d done? Refusing to believe in him, stalling him at every turn in his mission, and even convincing Keith not to believe in him anymore… After all she’d done to ruin his life, Lance still just cared about  _ her _ ? “No, it doesn’t matter what happens to me, I’m not worried about that—“

“Well maybe I am, Pidge!! Is that okay?!” 

She jumped at his volume, flinching away and unsure what to say to that. Even at his meanest, and his worst symptoms, he still just cared. About all of them. Luckily for her, Lance was quickly getting back to work now. He turned back to the teludav, pressing one last button. An electric, crackling noise came from somewhere inside of the device and suddenly the crystalline coaster from her living room lit up in dazzling white light. The glow of it slowly built up there before travelling up the wiring of the weathervane, the coils around the top pulsating before the beam of light shot somewhere under her bed like a laser. But the light didn’t come out from the other side of the bed. 

Lance sighed in relief, a small smile playing his face. . “It worked,” he nodded, with one more glance up to Pidge. “The wormhole’s open.” 

In this light, Pidge could definitely see the garish purple color of his skin. He didn’t have very long. “Can I tell you something,” she asked in an unsure voice. “Before you go down there?” 

“What is it, Pidgeon?” he asked. And when he asked it, his voice was his own again. Kind and light, as if the world was a funny story he remembered fondly. 

“You remember that first argument we had when you started turning? And you said that I was relieved when I couldn’t be a donor for Keith?” she asked, her own voice small and afraid.  “And then again, in the kitchen just now? You said something like... I told Keith what to believe because I had to prove I was smarter? ‘Know-it-all,’ I think was the term you used…” 

He blinked up at her, waiting for her to continue.

“You were right,” her voice was thick and rasping as she tried to keep her emotions under control. “When Keith got so sick, I was scared. He was really young, yeah, but so was I… and I didn’t even know how to be a part of a family, let alone how to lose that family. I thought maybe if I were a grown up then I’d have the answers… so…” She paused to swallow the lump that had formed in her throat. “So, I decided had to grow up, and I thought maybe if I could convince Keith to just grow up too, then he wouldn’t be scared either. But… You were right, okay? I just… I did more harm than good.” 

Lance sighed, finally managing to push himself up to his feet and taking a couple of steps towards her. “I know,” he reached out a hand like he was going to take hers, but pulled back again when he saw his claws. “ _ Real _ people get scared, Pidgeon. It’s perfectly logical.” 

“Please let me fix this, Lance…” her voice cracked, the tears falling freely now. “Let me fix this. I want to help.” 

He stayed quiet. And, for a moment, Pidge thought he was going to demand she stay put again. But then, he nodded. “Okay,” he answered, his voice gentle. Then, before she even had time to process his answer, he was turning to the teludav. “Help me get this thing on my back. It’s hard to pick stuff up with these dang claws.” 

Pidge gave one last sniffle, and immediately did as she was told, helping him to lift the device up and loops the straps over his shoulders. “Now, I’ve got to warn you,” he said. “Going through a wormhole is probably one of the worst feelings on the planet. Second only to riding the spin-y cups at the amusement park after eating an entire chili cheese fries entrée by yourself.” She made a face and gave him a small ‘ew’ before he continued. “Hold my hand until we’ve completed the jump, okay?” he looked her in the eye, his own a brilliant blue again for just a moment. “I don’t want us to get separated in Boogey World before we’ve even landed there. Can you do that?” 

She nodded with a reassuring grin as they kneeled down together beside the bed. With a deep breath, she reached out and laced her fingers between his, careful to avoid the sharp black nails. Before them was a small floating light, and the air around it rippled like water that had been disturbed. The glow it emitted seemed purple in color, the same as Lance’s skin. “Boogey World…” she breathed in amazement. It was all real, everything Lance had told her. The kid logic that powered the teludav, the entire alternate universe underneath her bed, powered by imagination and a child’s pain... The wormhole! In all honesty, Pidge was about ready to faint from the sight. It was a scientific marvel, after all! 

But Lance was on his stomach, pulling her down next to him and reaching out to touch the energy. “You ready, Pidgeon?” he asked one last time.

She took a deep breath and nodded. “Let’s do this. Let’s go bust that Boogey and get my brother back.” 


End file.
